Striped Bustle

The story of the striped bustle starts in college.

There was one fabric store on my side of the hill, and it was near the end of the bus line, requiring between one and three transfers depending on the day of the week and time of day. This was back in the days before I had my own car, so needless to say I didn't get out to the fabric store much. When I did, the pickings were... interesting, but somewhat slim. So anything with visual interest immediately stood out, regardless of whether it would be useful to me in my early, Renaissance-only costuming phase.

Early in my Freshman year, I found myself sitting in the main quad at Porter college, having just returned from the fabric store, and discovering that I'd bought a big length of what appeared to be a white polyester fabric with a blue stripe. I was horrified. I hemmed and hawed and couldn't for the life of me figure out what I was going to do with it. So I threw it in the stash and didn't think about it for years. A few years later, I tucked the still folded, unused fabric into a bin to try to sell off to other costumers - hilariously enough, this is often where I get my favorite dress fabrics.

Fast forward to 2007. While in the throes of a serious round of de-crufting, I threw the folded length of fabric on the "goes away" pile. This pile sat right next to my dress form. And while on the phone with someone one night, I started randomly fiddling with it and... Decided that since I was going to give it away anyway, maybe I should just make a dress. Once I'd given up on thinking of something cool to make with that fabric, I realized that... well, it would be fun to play around with stripes. A few weeks went by, and I threw the fabric up on my dress form with some pins and a bustle cage. The rest... is history.

I draped up some bustley shapes, which looked awesome with the crazy striped moire effect, and thus a new project was born.

I had to backpedal for a bit - I had a corset from my prior exertions at Dickens Fair and a small tie-on bustle cage given to me by a friend. But no petticoats of the appropriate shape, so those went first.

Woefully blurry (next time I just give up and use the flash the first time around) pic of my unfinished TV bustle petticoat #3, on my form. The idea was supposed to be that you could see how carefully I'd pinked the inner seams and all, doh.

Truly Victorian's Bustle petticoat #3, turned inside out while I added that bottom ruffle.

I got a little excited, with the petticoat finished, and threw the stripes back on. Awww, yeah, this is gonna be sweet...

Half of a jaquard stripe California King flat sheet. And some poly grosgrain, because I didn't want to make a waistband.

Tablier drape: This is the rough drape of the front tablier. Tablier is apparently French for "apron". Gee, can't imagine why...

This is all the fabric pinned in place to give a rough idea of what the final dress should kinda look like.

Here I'm making the bodice back skirted to fall nicely over the bustle. Unfortunately, since I only had an early pattern (about 1858) to go off of, this is mainly guesswork. Strange though, the little pleats at the edges of the T-back piece work out really well. I'll have to find buttons for them or something. I'll also need to face those, so you don't get raw edges in the back.

Yay draping. Ick, darts.

Truing the pattern off the muslin - Yes, I am lopsided. So are we all, actually.

Saving the pattern for posterity - Because last time I did free-form modifications to my Victorian bodice block, I didn't document them, which meant that for this version I had a bitch of a time pinning down the last revision so I could pattern from it. This way I can (theoretically) just knock out another one. Ha.

STRIPE HELL.

Oh yeah, THIS is why I don't work with stripes much. The moire effect makes my head hurt, and it takes fifteen times as long because you have to cut each piece out separately, and that's only *after* you've decided which way and where you want to match the stripes.

So you can see the fun stripes. :) the bottom half will be of white satiny stuff, waistcoat style.

From right to left: top half of bodice fronts, back lining, back, sides (pinned to side lining) and underneath the back and side tail facings.

Starts to look like real clothing all of the sudden!

Fan tail facing: This is what the back drape lining/facing looks like. The stripes show how it was cut to make the best use of what's left, and also gives you a better idea of how freaking full this stupid thing is.

Awww, crap! When I put the (entirely necessary and period correct too) front darts in, I realized that I'd made a serious error when drafting the first bits to piece. Just LOOK at how that beautiful curved line on the false-vest is totally ruined! And without enough of either fabric to go back and redo the whole thing, I had to figure out something else.

Almost, sortof, kinda, half-done:

You can see that I left the final shoulder fitting until the rest of the bodice was assembled. I have no regrets on that score. Here you can also see the basted tablier and the mock up of the rear drape as well. Note that at this point there are no sleeves, there's no front facing, and no fastenings. But it still looks so cool!

Fan tail with trimming pinned: Pretty self explanatory. The nice thing about having a line of trim around the tail is that it gives you a visual boundary between the bodice tail and the skirt that you would not otherwise have in the stripey chaos. Did I mention that trim is sculptable? It is. It really, really is.

Shortly after this last picture, I ran out of time. I had plans to wear this outfit to a birthday party in Golden Gate park, and the night before I kludged out some sleeves, and threw my ruffler foot on the sewing machine to add a bit of weight to the bottom of the tablier. I never even finished trimming the overskirt to make it rounded - I just threw on a ribbon bight to use as a hand strap, and pinned more ribbon underneath to hold it out in puffs. Nobody knew but me.

I still have a bunch of tulle for eventually finishing this gown... somewhere.