Time Passes And Progress Is Made

Half a loaf?

Dear Internet, it has been 10 days since my last confession, etc.  I was away and resolutely Not Sewing from Friday through Monday afternoon, which was perhaps imprudent as to time use but good for the soul; but I did not sit idle the rest of the time. Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings I advanced the corset a good ways, and the left half of it, as you see above, is complete.  (It is better practice, I believe, to do each step to both sides before proceeding to the next step; but when I had reached the bone placement, I just wanted to get one part done both for confirmation that it would come out right, and as a morale booster.)  I won a little time by finding some bias tape in my stash of a color I thought appropriate and agreeable--that's the pale blue edging you see in the photo--so didn't have to faff about cutting and forming bias bindings out of fabric.  If I have infinite time, HAR HAR, I would put the same lace from the chemise along the top, and perhaps thread a pale blue ribbon through, or do pale blue flossing along the boning channels.  

All in all I'm reasonably pleased with it so far.  There are wrinkles and unevenness--my machine sewing has greatly improved, but is still not precision, so there are spots where the fashion fabric piece was slightly larger than the lining it's supposed to match.  But, as a first effort, it is acceptable.

Last night I set the corset aside to attack my ancient enemy, the uniform trousers.  I had cut out all the fabric pieces when I got home on Monday, when there was still daylight, so I could dive in at any moment; this is a good strategy and I will do more of it in future.  So, I was well positioned to begin, and the first steps went slowly (it's all hand-sewing) but tolerably well.  Then my frail barque of confidence became dashed on the rocks of the fall binders.  What is a fall binder, you ask?

So.  Here's a pair of Regency pantses, opened up for your delectation:

The "fall" is that flap that's come down at the front, so that sir can take a wee without actually dropping his drawers.  The "fall bearers" are the matching, somewhat trapezoidal bits (in two parts, left and right), with two buttons, that, if the fall was raised up, would be completely covered by it.  And the "fall binders" are not terribly visible in the photo but they are what binds (see?) the fashion fabric of the fall to the lining of the fall.

Clear as mud?  Try this one:

Here's a pair of trousers for sale on Etsy, that I am as sure as sure can be were made from the same pattern I'm using now.  The fall binders are the long strips on the side of the fall, with the button at the top and the pointy bit at the bottom.  (Here's an actual pair from the V&A, which if you enlarge the image and turn up the brightness on your screen you can see similar binders.) Trying to get all this to line up, particularly with a slightly thick wool that doesn't really want to press, was driving me up a tree; the more since, even with having made the muslin, I didn't really grok how exactly the geometries were working.  And of course, because I had to frob parts of the pattern for correct fit, none of the marking dots were lining up for me.  I finally decided to set it aside for the evening...whereupon five minutes later I stood up and parsed it out enough to start from a better position on my next window of work.  So that's OK, but I was still rather stressed and upset, a situation that was not helped by our apartment hot water now not going above 100 of your Earth Fahrenheit degrees for the whole week so showers are restricted to "tepid at best".

The final insult-to-injury, well, let's have a picture worth 1k words:

re-creation of Sharpe's pants...though not
100% accurate anyways as his actual
trousers were cavalry trousers with
leather lining on the crotch & inseam

What do we not have any here?  FALL BINDERS.  The trim is performing the work of holding the fall and lining together instead. So I didn't really need to fuss with the stupid things in the first place.  :-/  I guess it's just as well, though, since I haven't found the right trim yet, so I'd've been at a stand-still until I did.