The WorldCon Masquerade might seem like a distant memory to some, but the months of work beforehand to get the costume ready are imprinted deeply onto my memory. This week I will be telling you all about how I made the corset cover and shirtwaist. And for those who don’t know Victorian clothing terms the corset cover was a layer worn between the corset and the outer clothes because frequently have large knobbly metal bits and very obvious lacing, so it’s a good idea to put a layer of fabric in between to stop it from catching on your nice outer clothes or showing through. The shirtwaist is a Victorianism for a shirt-like a bodice worn by women with dresses, generally a separate piece of clothing from the skirt, but may be made of matching fabric. At the end of the day, if you just think of it as a shirt that is fine.
Truth be told, my path to making a corset cover was a bit jumbled. It took a couple of failures to get properly started, and each one of them was a knock against my confidence. It’s hard to feel like you are a good sewist when you keep making silly mistakes, like using the shorter side of the fabric for where you need the length to be longer, or cutting without allowing for seam allowances. Yeah, spoilers for the future makes in this project but it was definitely the bodice section that was the most difficult for me.
Thinking back on it, I guess it makes sense. Bodices are the most complicated part of most outfits, to the point that historically, it was pretty common to get your bodice made up by a seamstress and then sew the skirt up yourself. But I’m still not happy about it.
In the end I put my various plans for fluffy corset covers that cinched in and puffed out at all the apropriate Victorian places aside, and instead made a simplified version of my shirtwaist bodice.
This was basically a mock up, but I left off the sleeves and the button front from the planned design. I made the pattern by drawing around a shirt I knew fit, then cut up the princess line from the bottom to the shoulder and separated those pieces a generous couple of inches. On the corset cover these were gathered into the shoulder seam, giving a little bit of extra room for the added curves of the Victorian silhouette. I then matched the shoulder gathers in the front of the bodice with gathers in the back of the collar. I wanted to see how putting the excess material in different places would look, so doing it differently in the front and back seemed like the best option.
I then finished the neckline with some baby blue ribbon and some lace in a similar shade, the lace was a really good match for the tiny, delicate flowers printed on the mock up material, so that made it come together really nicely. The hem and the sleeve holes I finished with some plain white bias binding, not very fancy, but it didn’t need to be. I have since cut some little puffed sleeves from the left over fabric and I plan on adding those to the corset cover once I have some time and oomph for doing things like sleeves. I’m a big fan of making mock ups that you can also wear, and while it’s OK as a corset cover it looks a bit unfinished without any sleeves.
When I tried the corset cover on I liked what I saw, but it was a little bit underwhelming. And Victorian fashion was all about doing as much as possible, throwing trims on ruffles and gathers on everything, so I did what any sensible Victorian seamstress would have done and I doubled the amount of fabric I was planning on gathering down.
There was enough excess fabric now that pleating was less clunky in the seams than gathering, and I think it looks a lot better. The pleats coming from the back of the neckline in the shirtwaist have a Watteau Pleat look to them, like the dresses of the 1700s, and I think it gives a really good flourish to the back of the outfit.
The front of the bodice I had decided should have a button stand and that was relatively easy to pattern and design, it was just another couple of inches to add to the front of the shirtwaist pattern. This time on one side only of the front, while the other side had a bit for seam allowance. The button stand was easy to do. The buttons and button holes, not so much.
The buttons themselves are gorgeous brass-coloured ivy leaves that I actually found at a haberdashery at a LARP! If you ever go to Empire then you will know the shop that has the wall of fantastic ribbons and trims, well they also sell beautiful buttons. Given that my fabric was all very autumn-toned toned finding a matching button of the type of leaf I needed was just phenomenal and I bought a dozen.
The problem with beautiful, interestingly shaped buttons, however, is working out how the heck they are supposed to go through a button hole. Especially since the length of the button versus the size of the button shank meant that they were super unsteady and wobbly when attached to the fabric. The fabric, too, was causing problems. I don’t have a button foot on the sewing machine I have access to, so I had to do it by hand, and the fabric was not happy about it. It felt like it was evaporating even as I sewed through it, and so there is a very good reason why that first button hole became the only one. The rest of the buttons are sewn onto the top layer of fabric, with poppers or snaps sewn behind so that I could close everything up without peppering my shirtwaist with holes.
By this point I was very paranoid about the fabric unravelling, so I spent quite a lot of time going over every piece of cut fabric on the bodice with some bias tape and protecting it the best I could. I would have had to do this at some point, but it did really feel like I was running a never ending marathon with the bias tape. Especially since there was very little of it that I felt confident about using the sewing machine for, so it was mostly hand sewing. I like hand sewing, it is my preferred way to sew, in fact. But there is a point where even a thing you like doing becomes a chore.
But I got it done and the best thing about getting to this point was that I could try it on and see how it looked! The answer was pretty damn good! Which was honestly a relief more than anything else, I had put so much time and effort into the shirtwaist that if it had looked awful my heart would have ripped itself out of my chest cavity and thrown itself onto the ground to smash into a thousand pieces.
Luckily it looked how I wanted it to and the fabric had this wonderful gleam to it, that was magnified by being on a body and in movement. The fabric is shot, so the colours on the warp and weft threads are different, one way is a very shiny bright orange, while the other is darker, rich terracotta. This means that it has such a wonderful glow to it. I really need to thank my lucky stars and whoever donated several metres of it to Oxfam for letting me have it for so little. It just looks sooo good!
Anyway, putting my rhapsodies about the fabric aside, let’s continue onto the part that procrastinated the most on, the sleeves.
Now my first attempt at doing these sleeves went horribly wrong. I somehow completely got the sizing wrong, which shouldn’t be a thing you can do on leg o’ mutton sleeves, but I managed to do the impossible. Basically I forgot to add seam allowance to the lower sleeve part, and they ended up being way too narrow. I tried adding some strips of fabric on to widen it, but it looked terrible and I realised I wasn’t going to be able to fix this in a way that would look even half as good as I wanted it to be. So I went back to my rapidly dwindling embroidered orange fabric and cut a second pair of sleeves, this time making sure to make them big everywhere.
This meant the cuffs were now larger than my wrists, I decided to finish the ends with a length of velvet ribbon I got from my Aunt’s massive de-stash last year, and then used that to create a channel for some elastic, that way it keeps them nice and close to my wrist but I can get it on and off my hands without too much bother. This is an outfit that already had a lot of lacing and awkward buttons, I didn’t need to add more!
I was back on the never-ending bias binding quest at this point. The sleeves were each as wide as I could get on my piece of fabric, and when I held them up against me, they were almost as tall as me, so it was not a quick process. Actually, I got so bored after doing the binding on these sleeves that I went to my fabric stash and made a pair of bloomers that hadn’t been on my to do list at all. But I just wanted to do something that felt like it had an end. You can find out more about those in one of the earlier Poison Ivy Cosplay posts here on the site.
I then got inside my head a bit too much and procrastinated a great deal because I thought the sleeves would be really difficult. It turns out, no so much? I lined up the armpit area so that it would be nice and smooth, then at the halfway point on the bodice side, I switched to gathering up the fabric as tightly as possible so that it would fit. It turns out big sleeves are actually not that bad, it did take a couple of goes for me to work out which way inside out I wanted things. If you sew you know what I mean and if you don’t, I’m sorry that is probably not very clear. But to be fair it’s quite difficult to work out in person too. But once I had gotten that stage of things sorted out, they actually came together really quickly. I was genuinely surprised by how quickly and easily they went on. Definitely going to remember that for all future projects, big sleeves are much easier to get on than ones that “fit”.
And that was pretty much it. I had intended on doing a big fancy collar, but I ended up just finishing the necklineon the shirtwaist with a bit more of the velvet ribbon that I used on the cuffs. In the future I will probably make that collar, but I didn’t have the time to make it as well as I wanted it, so I went for the easier option that would still look good. That actually used up the rest of that bit of ribbon, or almost. There is an inch and a bit left that I have been keeping with my sewing supplies. It’s just really nice to touch sometimes! Does anyone else keep little scraps of things like that?
I have another metre and a half or so of matching ribbon, but that’s enough for it to be useful so I wanted to save it for more interesting things than covering cuffs and collars. One of my tentative goals is to make a really, really big hat and that might end up being a part of that project. But that will be far in the future as I did make a smaller hat that I like very much.
That’s stealing from a future post, however, so no more about hats here!
Thank you for reading, I hope this has inspired some of you to make very silly costumes, please let me know in the comments if I have achieved that lofty goal!
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Stay safe out there,
K
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