Saturday, August 10, 2013

Things I learned at Costume College Part 1

So one of the classes that I took at Costume College was 18th Century Petticoats and Aprons.  Now I've made a few petticoats (corded and otherwise) but even with all my reading and looking at photos of extant garments, I knew I was missing something.  To be HA (which I'm not normally super concerned with) you use natural fiber fabric in linen, wool, silk, or even cotton and you hand stitch it.  I usually end up machine stitching at least parts of my garments (and I did with this one.)  The hems are ferreted (sp?).  Below is my best definition of "ferreting".

"To ferret the hem" was new terminology to me.  I looked it up on Google and all the old sewing books I had to no avail - even Wikipedia couldn't help. Ferreting is a technique when you sew linen tape or bias tape to the right side of the fabric with about an 1/8 of an inch seam.  Then you wrap the tape to the underside of the fabric - leaving just a hint showing at the hem and sew it down.  In the 18th Century this would protect the hem from wear....
 Here is my first attempt.
I used button hole stitches along the bottom of the side slits.

Look at the white peeping out!  That's the tape!  It protects the hem and helps it stand out a bit!

18th C petticoats are tied on in two halves.  This one is short enough to be a petticoat.

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