19th Century Project: Every Day I'm Muslin'

Jerry likes muslin piles.

There are those experienced sempsters and tailoresses who, I am sure, can go forth armed with a pattern they have never seen before and immediately produce a perfect garment; I imagine it like the equivalent of sight-reading a symphony, or being able to hear a song and immediately play it.

The rest of us create a muslin, which is called thus because it's usually made out of muslin, though not always (e.g., for a corset you need to use a far sturdier fabric).  This gives you plenty of low-risk opportunity to a) figure out how the pattern works and b) make sure it fits on the test subject.  Then, depending on your situation and preference, you can either use the amended muslin pieces as your final pattern, or you can back-port the amended muslin to your paper pattern.  And then, at last, when you know what you're doing, you make your actual garment.

This is what a corset looks like before it's sexy.

Muslin the First: the corset.  I cut this out & basted it together weekend before last, actually, and taped the bones in rough place with masking tape (there has to be enough structure in place to confirm you're getting the shape and support you need, but ain't nobody got time to do the full monty of sewing boning channels for this).  At that point, unless you're a wizard, you need a second pair of hands to pin it closed and check your fit, which happened later in the week.  Beth came over last week to do that service for me; we calculated the necessary edits, and I've cut out & sewn the re-engineered pieces.  Waiting for final fit, and then I can Make The Thing.  (And once the Thing is Made, then I can make the muslin for the dress.)

The Back View. You
can make some shortcuts
on the muslin, like only doing
one sleeve

Muslin the Second: the uniform jacket.  This was not as straightforward because I'm modifying the pattern; not in structurally significant ways, or shouldn't be, but I needed to completely understand the base pattern to ensure that my edits didn't have unintended consequences.  Which, happily, they did not, and the muslin went together quickly and fit, mirabile dictu.  I can work directly from the paper pattern and just cut across the tail part (with one small edit, about which more in a subsequent post).  

Muslin the Third: the uniform trousers.  groan

not that you can really
see the moon here

Let me preface this by saying that I've made, let's see, two pairs of generic-SCA-medieval-oid pants and four pairs of Venetian hose (which are pants that come down to the knee or so), and there's still a lot about pants that just do not make sense to me.  The pockets alone on the Venetians took me the better part of a week to suss; and Venetians are, for the most part, a simplified version of modern pants.  Regency trousers are very, very different.  There are pockets...a completely different kind of pocket...and there are front falls (think a drop-seat like in comical old cartoons, but at the front) and they sit very high and they are tight in front but roomy in back, completely opposite to how things roll now-a-days.  So, I knew I had to do a full muslin rather than just "here's a leg and here's a waist and do they work?"  I also had to math the pattern a fair bit to fit the subject (there's a reason a Regency gentleman's tailor was his most prized engagement, I am discovering).  But I have got a fair way towards figuring it out, and might have had it done except I had to pause operations to go look at the SuperBloodMoonEclipse.

So, that brings us to Sunday night.  In the meantime I've been working on sourcing my remaining fabric & notions, with mixed results (that is, "none" and "utter confusion").  I've also found a bunch of good photos & information of the only existing period uniform tunic, which incidentally generated what appears to have been a panic attack last night.  Tune in next episode for the exciting conclusion!