HSM October Challenge: Details

Here we are at the third-to-last Challenge for the year. The devil is in the detail, apparently - and Details are the thing to focus on for this month. Of course, you are a detail-oriented group anyways, but for October let's really make those special features sing!

One obvious way to enhance the details of your garment are with decorative elements. This can be trim, applique, embroidery or beading - or how about everything, like this amazing c.1902 woman's walking suit (sold privately in an online sale). It has a cutout dot pattern of black velvet on white silk, applied satin bands swooping up the back of the outfit, applied felt with embroidery and rope trim creating little branch motifs on the collar, and the interior edge of the jacket is highly decorated even though it cannot be seen when the jacket is worn. It is a riot of detail!

Further images can be found at http://www.antiquedress.com/item200.htm

On a more sedate level, this 1880s afternoon dress uses a little decoration to great effect. The brown velveteen bows and the matching collar and cuffs are reserved, but have as much impact because they are not lost in a sea of trim. The asymmetrical lace shoulder panel and the peeks of lace visible in the folds of the skirt really catch the eye.

Afternoon dress, ca. 1888; American. 2009.300.502a–c, The Met.

Decoration can often not just be adding, but taking away. Cutwork, strapwork, and stamping featured heavily on many garments in the 16th Century, such as doublets of silk, leather, or linen, as a way of adding detail and textural interest to clothing. One element which also featured regularly on clothing of that time were buttons. Buttons are such a wonderful detail, and can often be overlooked. They can bring a decorative touch to a plainer garment with very little effort. There is much beauty in a well-made buttonhole or self-fabric button - below are some highlights:

25 silver buttons, c.1600, T3430_2, Germanisches National Museum/ detail of the jerkin of Hugo de Groot, c.1575-1621, Museum Rotterdam 20535-1/ detail of woman's informal jacket, c.1605-20, V&A Museum.

Thread-wrapped button, 18th Century, Colonial Williamsburg Museum/ braided yarn button, c.1590-96, NG-NM-9468-1, Rijksmuseum/ silk thread-wrapped button, 1840-45, 1974.194.5, The Met Museum.

The jacket from which the last set of buttons comes is another wonderful garment. The jacket is made of linen, with some fashionable touches such as winged shoulders and a stand-up collar. The linen itself has a repeating woven stripe running through it of silk and silver threads - not entirely expected on a casual linen garment. The seams of the garment are also decoratively piped, and the buttons are thread-wrapped with silver. I particularly like that you can see how the maker ran the thread attaching the buttons around and under the edge of the garment. For such an outwardly plain-looking item of clothing, there are so many joyful details to be found.

Woman's informal jacket, 1606-20, acc.no. 188-1900, V&A Museum.

A great amount of pleasing detail can be gained from clever use of fabric, particularly those with a print or pattern. This man's waistcoat, c.1760s France, has pattern-matched the silk exactly across the front of the garment, showing the brocade to best effect.

Man's sleeved waistcoat, 1760s, silk plain weave with metal sequins, M.54.18.4, LACMA.

Accessories are a great way to ramp up the detail on an outfit. Complex techniques can be applied to a smaller project with good payoff from the effort. Accessories can be either functional or decorative, or both. The cap and braces below would have been a stylish addition to the Victorian gentleman's at-home attire, while the buff leather gloves were probably for riding and maybe had a military use. Even this very practical item has been shown attention to detail in the overlaid scallops on the cuff.

Matching smoking cap and braces, 1875-1900, McCord Museum http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/M984.150.5.1-2/  /  men's armoured buff gloves, c.1600-50, Accession No: 23457+A, collection of the Worshipful Company of Glovers.

Reticules or other bags are the perfect canvas for details. Sequins/spangles, silk painting, trimming - so much can be done. Hats are another item which can take a lot of detail and really help bring an outfit or impression together. The below reticule has been embroidered, with the addition of tassels at the corners to jazz it up even further. Fashion prints showed a wealth of detail in both clothing and accessories, which could be mimicked or used as inspiration by women to add a little more detail to their own clothing.

Reticule, 1800-15, PR 1995.7.1, Musée des Arts Décoratifs / Fashion plate for Les Modes Illustrées 1887, M.74.50.48, LACMA.

One of the best ways to showcase detail in a very unobtrusive way is to take care of the fine construction details of your garment. It doesn't always have to be the extravagant stuff! I know for myself this can be such an easy aspect of making to overlook. Sometimes all we want is to rush to the exterior bits. But tiny, even stitches; exquisite hand-finishing; beautifully applied fastenings - these can be some of the best details of an item. Lace insertion panels in a white cotton blouse... cross-stitched laundry marks on an undershirt... pintucks added to the hem of a petticoat...

One of the things we love seeing is how you all interpret the Challenge themes. I'm sure plenty of you will come up with an idea that I'd never have thought of. So good luck with making your items, we can't wait to see what you all come up with!

HSM July Challenge: Unexpected

And so to July, and the seventh challenge in this year's roster. The theme for July is Unexpected. Make an item with an unexpected feature. Will it be a snazzy lining, a hidden pocket, or something else? Surprise us! 

I originally thought that finding good examples for this theme would be near-impossible, but they have been cropping up over the last few months and I have been squirrelling them away on my Pinterest board. Hopefully something in this post will give you an idea for your own Unexpected item.

First up, this set of stays from the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Unfortunately the museum image is quite small, but there are other views of it on Redthreaded's blog about the Structuring Fashion Conference in Germany in 2018, and also on Laurie Tavan's blog and on Redthreaded and Julia Bremble's Instagram accounts (search for #structuringfashionconference and #structuringfashion tags).
The silk stays are beautiful on the outside, but rather than the plain lining usually seen on extant stays they have a printed lining featuring pomegranates: 

A couple of other examples exist, including this pair of stays with checked lining from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This pair has a beautiful silk satin outer fabric, but the tabs are all covered in different silk brocades, a feature which looks very unexpected to our 21st Century eyes. These came through the Whittaker auction house, dated to 1780s Italy.

Staying with corsetry, it is often forgotten that for some time men's corsetry was unexpectedly common, as these two print adverts show. The first one is undated but appears to be very late 19th/early 20th Century. The second dates to 1936. 

Some surprising motifs show up in 18th Century mens waistcoat embroidery. From the recent V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature comes this c.1780-89 silk example with a beautifully rendered pair of macaques, taken from a scientific book published around the same time. 

We also have more whimsical images, such as these delightful hot air balloons. This waistcoat was sold by Meg Andrews and dates to c.1784.

Embroidery also features in this next item, a pair of woman's shoes from the 1750s, also from the V&A. The look of the shoe is enhanced by the use of straw, with each strand carefully couched onto the base fabric and the floral design applied over the straw.

Straw is also used as the embroidery material on this woman's ball gown c.1865 (Textile Research Centre, Leiden) and on this 1951 Christian Dior dress made for Princess Margaret of Great Britain (with close-up detail). This dress is outside the HSM timeline being made after 1938, however it is an interesting nod to past usage and shows that straw embroidery was still unexpectedly showing up in the centuries following our two main examples.

Fabrics themselves can also be very surprising. Spun glass was an innovation used to great effect in the latter half of the 19th Century. Whole dresses were created from the fibre [usually mixed with another fibre for strength and robustness]. The Libbey Company of Toledo, Ohio had built a crystal exhibition hall of their own and in 1893 attendees at the World's Columbian Fair could purchase souvenirs such as this man's tie made of spun glass fibre, now in the Corning Museum of Glass.

Taking a step slightly back in time, we have this day dress in two parts dated c.1885 from the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. It appears to be a remade wool shawl, but the fabric is cotton and was printed 'a disposition', meaning it was printed specifically to be cut into a dress of this style.

This girl's dress from the late 1770s displays a very unusual feature in the form of scale-like smocking across the shoulders and arms (The Met). 

Hidden or secret pockets were often a feature of historical garments. There are Elizabethan portraits from the late 1500s in England showing what appear to be pockets in the sleeves of fashionable men's peascod doublets. Many clothing items, both male and female, had hidden pockets for small personal items. In the mid-19th Century, women's watch pockets were often skillfully concealed in the skirt waistband or the edge of the front opening. In fact, contrary to today's poor representation in modern garments, in the recent past women's clothing often featured several types of pocket, both concealed and not, including a period in the late 1860s/early 1870s where fan and parasol pockets were a thing. The example below is well-hidden in the bustle of this tennis dress from the 1880s, in the LACMA collections.

This wonderful 17th Century knitted jacket held by the National Museum of Scotland looks unexpectedly modern, with the use of the checked plain-purl pattern at the bottom. It is Venetian and made of silk thread with some gilt thread embellishment.

Possibly one of the more interesting instances of unexpected clothing are items which are deliberately concealed in houses or other structures. These are frequently shoes, but hats, stays, and other items of clothing have all been found hidden in the walls, under floors, or behind fireplaces of old buildings. This doublet was found in Reigate, UK and was dated to the early 17th Century. Possibly the most well-known recent find of concealed garments was the Lengberg cache of underwear, which included what can only be described as a 15th Century bra - an item which itself was completely unexpected!

Deliberately Concealed Garments Project

HSM June Challenge Inspiration: Favourite Technique

It's June, and we are already at the end of the first half of HSM 2019! I don't know about you, but the past 6 months flew.

June's Challenge theme is Favourite Technique. We are asking you to create something that makes use of your favourite sewing or embellishment technique. This should give plenty of scope for items to create!

One of the most basic ways to influence the look of the item you are making is with draping, pattern-manipulation, or tailoring. Clever cutting of garment pieces has been used for thousands of years to shape and mould a flat panel of fabric into interesting 3d shapes. The Herjolfsnes garments are one example of this. Found in Greenland during archaeological digs in the early 20thC, they display use of shaped panels under the arms and inserted gores to maximise fullness of the skirt while maintaining fit around the torso. Tailoring techniques grew and developed through time to a peak in the 18th and 19th centuries. Both men's and women's clothing made use of these techniques, such as the 18thC woman's riding habit, and the different forms of the male 3-piece suit.

Man's clothing, American made, 1845-53. T.177-1965, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Woman's riding habit, Italian,  c.1780. M.82.16.2a-c, LACMA.

Perhaps you are a fan of handsewing, which can be used as a construction technique on its own or as decoration with a contrast thread. There are many specialist stitches which can be used in the construction and finishing of garments, from running backstitch and flat-felling to english stitch, le point a rabbatre sous la main, and mantua-maker's seam. The recent American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Clothing has a lovely visual guide to the roster of stitches known to be used in creating Georgian clothing, but many have provenances which go much further back in time and can be used in other historical periods.

Other handsewing techniques which may be used to enhance the appearance of a garment include smocking, pintucking, and gathering. This example, one of the so-called Sture shirts, shows extensive use of gathering at the neck and cuffs.

Shirt belonging to one of the Sture group executed in 1567. DIG024963, Upplandsmuseet (Sweden).

The use of purely decorative hand stitching known today as embroidery provides a wealth of creative opportunity and can be utilised on items both large and small. Naturalistic motifs, blackwork, corset flossing, goldwork, tambour - whether large scale or small, embroidery is a great way to add visual interest and liven up a piece.

From left: Tunic, 6th-7th Century, presumed Egyptian Coptic; 12.185.3, Met Museum / Coif and forehead cloth, 1600-1650, English; T.53&A-1947, V&A / Waistcoat, 1800-1815, Italian; 26.56.35 / Dressing gown, 1880s, Japanese for the western market; Fall 2018 Lot 537, Whitaker Auctions.

Applied decoration is another method seen throughout history and it covers a multitude, including rouleaux trim, braidwork, tablet weaving, ruffles, soutache, spangles and beads, ribbon trim, contrast bands and binding, piping, and passementerie... These can be placed on items large and small, and can be made of self fabric or another material. Tablet weaving is known to have existed as far back as the 8th century BCE (early Iron Age Europe), and the Torah contains directives for clothing to carry tassels or fringes. Beaded decoration is often found on the clothing of native peoples of the Americas.

I'm also going to include printing and painting as part of this category as in both of these a paint, ink, or other dye is applied to the fabric or item for aesthetic purposes. Wall paintings show Minoan textiles with intricate patterns that required both simple and complex weaving processes, embroidery, or painting. The eventual industrialisation of block printing and further innovations in this field led to roller-printed textiles becoming readily available in the mid-19th Century.

Tablet woven textile from the Oseberg ship burial, dated c. 834.

Cutwork can frequently appear as a mode of embellishment on garments and accessories, either on the main body of the item such as pinking or latticework, or to create a decorative hem in the case of scalloped and vandyke or sawtooth edging.

Finds of Roman shoes displaying a variety of cut lattice patterns in the Vindolanda Roman Army Museum.

One decorative approach which falls under many of the above categories is the use of lace. The early beginnings of lacemaking go as far back as 2500BCE, with development progressing over time from basic netted decorations to highly complex figurative work. Lace itself can be made by
embroidery, applique, cutwork, or a combination of these. It can be applied to items as a decorative flourish or integrated by use of lace insertion technique.

Point plat de Venise lace, mid-17th Century / early lace in a detail from Hans Memling's The Virgin and Child, c. 1485.

Pleating has been extensively used in the construction and/or decoration of garments from the ancient world up to the present. Ancient Egyptian and Greek garments made frequent use of pleating to service both appearance and fit. Victorian women's clothing shows highly creative use of pleating in overskirts and other garments.

Hopefully that gives you all an idea of the range of techniques that can be employed as part of this challenge! Good luck!