Pants With Buttons

I made pants!

Pants have been on my to- do list for a very long time. I was down to two pairs of store bought pants, because I didn't want to buy new ones knowing they wouldn't fit. Last year I had four pairs, but two have since worn out, so sewing pants was something I couldn't put off any longer.

I made the pattern using the basic pant draft from school. I gave it a waistband, a fall front, and pockets.
I really like the fact that the waistband of this pattern is actually at the waist. I can't stand low cut pants.

For the fall front I made two plackets, like you might find on a modern shirt cuff.

I didn't do a great job on them, but they work.

One is a little wider than the other. The pieces aren't sewn
together in this picture.

I did not take many pictures of the construction because I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing and consequently messed a few things up. I will go into more detail in a later pair of pants, once I have things figured out.
Here are the completed pants.

 They fasten with ten buttons, and there are two welt pockets in the front.

The fabric is a cotton blend that I got on clearance. I think it was one of those 97% cotton, 3% spandex ones. It has a bit of stretch and a sort of nubbly texture. I made the inside of the waistband out of black denim, so I didn't have to interface it. The pocket bags are plain, tightly woven cotton.

The seams are all machine sewn (which is why the welts and plackets are rather uneven) and the raw edges are serged.

I hemmed it by hand with a slipstitch.
I cut flaps for the inside of the fall front, but didn't put them in because the under side of the placket went where they should have gone. Next time I will have thought things through more thoroughly.

I really like them. They fit, and they have buttons!
I much prefer buttons to zippers.

The Beginnings of a Frock Coat

I am finally making a coat! It will be a late 1780's style frock coat.
The pattern is based on this one.

Young Officer in a Zebra Coat, calling someone to give an account of his services. Galerie des Modes, 1789. (source)

And here is an extant example of a very similarly patterned coat.

Man's suit, c. 1790- 95. Bunka Gakuen.

(I'm so sorry that I couldn't send a link to the page with the suit. Their museum database is insanely frustrating to navigate.)

It has the same seams, as well as the large rectangular pockets placed very far back.
My pattern is roughly based on a couple of the ones from The Cut of Men's Clothes: 1600-1900.

I started by tracing around one of my waistcoat patterns. I moved the side seams further back, took a few measurements, and drew the coat pattern around it.

I drafted the collar with the mandarin collar drafting method we learned in school. The sleeves are the sleeve pieces from my drawstring jacket, but widened a bit, and with a less pointed elbow. No sense in drafting a whole new shaped sleeve.
It worked better than I expected. The first mockup had a great many fit problems, but they were pretty easy to fix.
Here are three terrible pictures of the second mockup.

I was a bit concerned by the diagonal wrinkles on the sides and the puckers at the back of the sleeve caps, but I looked at some extant coats and they wrinkled in the exact same way.

The finished pattern.
It doesn't stand out very well against the concrete floor.

For the outward stuff I'm using a nice black denim. I'm not aiming for historical accuracy with this coat.
This denim is really nice because the dye actually goes all the way through, so it won't get pale spots when it wears.

The lining is linen. It was an icky brown when I got it, but I dyed some of it black. It came out dark grey, but that's fine.

The brown doesn't look too bad here, but it's a really icky shade in person.

I'm sewing a lot of it by machine using heavy thread. I sewed the pocket flaps by machine on the bottom three sides, then turned them and finished the top edge by hand.

I folded the front edge up a bit higher, so it will hide the back edge.

I have flat-lined the sleeves using the same method that worked so well with the drawstring jacket sleeves.

I pinned the lining pieces onto their corresponding outer pieces. Rather than use a running stitch, I sewed up the sides by machine, using regular thread.
Before turning them I marked the stitching lines with white basting on the denim layer only. Afterwards I marked those lines again with red basting, going through both layers. In this manner I kept the stitching line visible on the right side of the lining, which will be useful when I sew the sleeves on.

I whip stitched the sides of the sleeves together, stopping about 4 inches short of the cuff. This is because I haven't trimmed the cuff to length and I don't want to risk cutting through my stitching.

The sleeve seam from the outside.

 That's as far as I've gotten. I basted one of the sleeves in to make sure the notch is in the correct place.

You can see that I will have to trim a fair amount off of the cuff.

The sides are wrinkling a bit more than they would normally because the wool waistcoat is very bulky.

I can't wait until it's finished! I love the swallow tail shape of these coats.
If my stripey stockings look a little odd here, it's because I am wearing 2 layers of ripped tights over them.

I don't know if I will get much time to work on this over the next couple of weeks.
I have to do a challenge piece for the school fashion show. This year the challenge is rope. I have to make an outfit that is at least 80% rope on the outside by March 12th.
I have all the pieces cut out for my Fairytale challenge, but it is highly unlikely that they will be sewn together by the deadline.

More Pages From The Surprise Cookbook c. 1868

Here are more pictures of The Surprise Cookbook. I apologize for the poor quality of some of these photographs. Click for a larger view.

They specify what the other sauces are for, but how are we to know what to use the egg sauce on?

Boiled squash and pumpkin? Why? They taste SO much better if you bake them.

I have never heard of either of these things.

Potato snow does sound very pretty in appearance, but how would one eat it?

This is the second recipe for pumpkin, several pages after the first. This happens more than once in this book. Cookbooks should not be this disorganized.
At the end of the book there is a chapter called Additional Recipes, which seems like an afterthought. It has recipes that should be in the other sections, but they're just jumbled together in one, as if they were forgotten when the rest of the book was being written.

I have never tasted them together but I seriously doubt that lettuce and gravy are compatible.

 Yay, it's the bread and cake section!

Where do these names come from?

I love how unspecific these are. How much is "some"?

The way the cup cake recipes are presented is quite amusing.

Oh dear, I just realized that some of these recipes are only half here because they continue onto the next page and I didn't photograph all the pages, sorry! I do want to make the whole book available somehow, so that you can see all of the recipes.

A drachm. I haven't seen that measurement anywhere before.

I see a typo!

The pastry section has some very nice illustrations of fruit. Thankfully they have not been scribbled on with crayon like most of the meat diagrams.

Some of these sound quite good. I'd like to try a few.