The Great 1840s Madness, and Some 18th c. Toile-ing

It feels fantastic to be sewing again, and to be sewing on a tight deadline. I believe in the power of tight deadlines to keep us excited about a project, make us (or at least me) do some of our best work, and to benefit from the full effect of finishing something and getting to wear it with pride immediately. I find that if a project is finished and sits on the dress form for too long, it gets stale, and my mind goes off to other things before I’ve had a chance to wear my *new* creation.

All that being said, it’s been a flurry of stitching excitement over here. I’ve cut James’ :ubersexlich patterns and have done toiles for two of the three pieces – the waistcoat and the frock coat. In the world of blogging, this is really not that exciting – we want to see colors and trims and pretty stitching! – but I’m VERY pleased with how the suit is coming along! It’s impossible to tell anything about it on my boob-tastic dress form. James is obviously not shaped this way. I’m looking forward to the fitting in about a week, though I have a couple other things to do before then – one is finding silver trim-of-win, the other is toile-ing the breeches, which will take quite a bit more time than both the frock coat and the waistcoat.

I’m happy to say, however, that everything is coming off quickly and in good measure. I leapt into the 1840s day bodice, and am pleased to report a garment that FITS, despite its “organic” creation. Instead of doing a gathered front, I went with pleats – the gathered front looked wonky and would have required quite a lot of hand-tacking to keep everything in place for what would essentially be a frumptastic bodice. The pleats worked really well to “take up the slack,” and now I get to do fun things with buttons, yay!

I dug out these taffetta covered buttons from The Stash, but I think they are a bit oversized. What say you, o’ women of the web? I have 14 uncovered “wedding sized” buttons that I think will work much better, and I plan to carry them up the center front and on the sides, but not past the bust. We’ll see how that looks…