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A 1910s-20s hat re-re-re-re-make

Welcome to a long, involved story about how a hat went through many design permutations before it finally became a lovely thing that I enjoy wearing!

I originally (all the way back in April 2017…) started out wanting to make this Lily Elsie mushroom hat to wear with my Miss Muffet dress:

Lilie Elsie, ca 1912 — Lily Elsie, ca 1912

I began with a fairly generic straw sunhat I’d found at an op shop. I soaked it and re-shaped it over a hat-block and towels to get that mushroom shape. Somewhere there are photos of the process, but I just can’t find them.

Update: I have found one of the original re-shaping photos! The curved-up back brim is based on a catalogue image from 1913:

And…it looked terrible on me.

So it went in the naughty pile.

And then I needed a hat to go with the 1918-19 Not Another Blue Dress, so it came back out, and I re-shaped it again intp a shape halfway between this painting:

Charles Courtney Curran, The Boulder, 1915

And the bottom left hat:

And then added a dark blue ribbon under the brim, and started trimming it with flowers all over the crown like the hat worn with the blue gingham dress:

And it looked really cute, but not with the Not Another Blue Dress – which happily did look amazing with my Tricorne Revival hat! (so at least one costume orphan got another use!).

So half finished, it went back into the naughty pile.

With the Waitangi Day garden party coming up I decided I needed a really good garden party hat to wear with my new dress. Something lovely and spring-y. This hat was the right shape, but the dark blue ribbon and flowers weren’t right.

So I pulled them off, and went back to the drawing board!

I assembled a pinterest board of mid-teens hats, and one of 1920s hats, and then started finding elements that I liked, and that I had the materials for.

I decided I really liked the fabric covered crowns you see with some teens & 20s hats. They are mostly shown with fabric brims, like the blue one in the top right, but there are definitely examples with straw brims and fabric crowns.

I had a scrap of silk crepe de chine from an end-of-bolt. It had tape marks and writing on it, but by cutting carefully I could cover the crown and make some lovely lush decorations.

A 1910s-20s hat re-fashion thedreamstress.com

The rosettes are made by cutting wide strips of crepe de chine on the bias using scalloped pinking shears. I then hand basted along one edge, gather the ribbon in, and then sewed a second line of stitches a bit out from the centre one, to create a floral centre, and to control the fullness of the ‘flower’

I went through my entire ribbon stash, and couldn’t find a better match for the under-brim ribbon (which hides the millinery wire, and is a very 10s-20s touch) than a satin ribbon.

The colour was right, but the satin ribbon looked terrible eased around the crown, because viscose satin simply doesn’t ease. You can see every wobble and tiny sewn in crease in it.

The trip to Fernside Gardens gave me another chance to wear the hat, and a chance to fix the brim ribbon – and re-trim the hat to be a bit more 1910s instead of 20s.

I searched every store in Wellington, and finally found a cream petersham ribbon for the poor much-unpicked and re-sewn brim.

With the help of judicious amounts of steaming, pinning, and the assistance of a hairpin (my favourite finessing tool for really delicate sewing), I got the 3cm wide petersham tape to go on smoothly and perfectly:

It’s one of those things that you can only achieve through the wonderful shape-ability of natural fibre petersham.

And how do you get a hat to look more Edwardian? Add feathers!

I had some vintage brown ostrich feathers in my stash, and the pinky brown hues worked perfectly with the peachy crepe-de-chine.

A swoosh of them across the back and up one side of the hat added just the right touch.

If needed, I can take them off again, and restore the hat to its more 20s look. I love it either way though!

Many thanks to Miss A for additional pictures of me at Fernside Gardens (anything with a tiny logo is Miss A’s)

Best of all, the hat fits perfectly into the Historical Sew Monthly February Challenge theme of ‘Re-Use’

“Use thrifted materials or old garments or bedlinen to make a new garment. Mend, re-shape or re-trim an existing garment to prolong its life.”

What the item is: A teens-early 20s hat

How it fits the challenge: The hat is re-shaped from standard sun-hat, bought at an op-shop. The millinery wire was repurposed from another old hat. It’s trimmed with an end-of-bolt silk remnant that had tape glue and pen marks on it, and vintage ostrich feathers. The only totally new thing on it is the petersham ribbon.

Material: a straw hat, silk crepe de chine

Pattern: None, inspired by a bunch of 1910s & 20s photographs and fashion plates

Year: 1913-23

Notions: millinery wire, grosgrain ribbon, thread, ostrich feathers

How historically accurate is it? It’s inspired by the general shape and trims of teens and 20s hats, but not based on a specific example. The construction is much more basic than most (although not all) hats of this era, and mostly I just kept tweaking and adding stuff till it looked good. A few elements are very accurate, but the overall look is plausible rather than totally accurate.

Hours to complete: 5-8, depending on whether you count all the re-shaping and trimmings before I got to a good result!

First worn: Feb 6, Waitangi Day, to a garden party at the Governor General’s residence

Total cost: $12-ish. All bits were from stash and purchased years ago from op-shops, but that’s my best guess.

Aaron Martinet French, 1762 - 1841 Les Invisibles en tÃªte-Ã -tÃªte (TÃªte-Ã -TÃªte with Poke Bonnets) Le Supreme Bon Ton, pl. 16 (series) c. 1805

Emma echoes Regency Era prints

Published by The Dreamstress

Have you seen the new Emma movie yet?

Some of the Wellington historical sewists and I went to see it earlier this week. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. If you haven’t seen it, you may wish to skip this post to avoid spoilers.

Mini review: The cinematography was lush and deliciously beautiful, the screenplay was brilliant and gave a new twist to a story that has been done many times before (well done Eleanor Catton), the costumes were exactly what you’d expect from Alexandra Byrne (costumes rather than clothes, but very pretty, with many gorgeous covetable pieces, quite a few where you could immediately point to the extant piece that inspired them, and the occasional weird misfit that yanks you right out of the world), and Anya Taylor-Joy was skilled enough of an actress to overcome my misgivings about her as Emma. The only drawbacks were a few small moments when the film got weird (*cough* *cough* first look at Mr Knightley and after the ball at the Crown), and Emma’s hairstyles, which were so awful that they distracted me for half the film.

But the best part was picking up all the references to late 18th c & Regency fashion plates and satirical prints. It was a delicious treat for the more serious Regency aficionados.

If you’ve seen the film, you may recognise Comfort:

Comfort, Lewis, M. G. (Matthew Gregory), 1775-1818, NYPL b18200023

And Emma’s ball dress from the ball at the Crown, both in style, trim, and pose in a few scenes:

And Harriet and Mr Martin’s kiss near the end of the film is a pretty obvious reference to this rather saucy satirical print:

(saucy because there is a clear subtext about men sticking things in holes…)

Did you notice any others?

Spencer jacket & petticoat, France, circa 1815, Jacket- cotton plain weave; skirt- cotton plain weave with linen net and cotton plain-weave appliques, LACMA M.2007.211.15a-b

Rate the Spencer & Skirt

Published by The Dreamstress

I’ve had a very busy week, with teaching and patternmaking and talking, which is why there have been no posts between last week’s Rate the Dress and today’s post. Luckily I had this week’s garment for rating all picked out! I hope you enjoy studying it as much as last week’s wedding dress.

P. S. Welcome to new raters! PLEASE read the note at the bottom of this post.

Last Week: an all-lace Edwardian wedding dress

Last week’s frock should probably get a bonus point for breaking the 50 comment mark! If nothing else, you certainly found it interesting.

There were three distinct comment groups: 9s, 7s, & 4s. And only one person rated it a 10! With so many unimpressed raters, the total came in at…

The Total: 6.4 out of 10

Not a popular choice with many!

This week: an Empire era spencer & petticoat

This week’s Rate the Dress continues last week’s white and lacy theme for the bottom half, with a petticoat trimmed with linen net and appliqued lace, and goes dark on the upper half with a military and historically inspired spencer jacket.

Spencer jacket & skirt, France, circa 1815, Jacket- cotton plain weave; skirt- cotton plain weave with linen net and cotton plain-weave appliques, LACMA M.2007.211.15a-b — *Spencer jacket & petticoat, France, circa 1815, Jacket- cotton plain weave; skirt- cotton plain weave with linen net and cotton plain-weave appliques, LACMA M.2007.211.15a-b*

LACMA and I are calling this a petticoat, but frothy and lacy as it is that doesn’t mean it’s an undergarment: petticoat was the term for any skirt (whether it was worn as the outer layer, or an under-layer) in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century. It’s because what you wear on the lower part of your body is a petti (small or lower) coat (garment).

This particular petticoat is trimmed with rows of insertion and ruffles made of appliqueing floral and leaf motifs on net to form a type of lace. The net is probably a machine bobbin-net, which was a new innovation which made net based lace affordable and wildly fashionable, but may have been a handmade (and wildly expensive and time consuming) net.

The petticoat is paired with a spencer jacket: the short jackets which ended at the high waist fashionable in the first quarter of the 18th century. The jacket features both military influence, in the buttoned front which imitates uniform jackets, and a nod to Renaissance fashions in the puffed over-sleeves. Both elements were common, and it’s not unusual to see them combined in one garment, as they are here.

While the net base of the skirt lace was probably machine made, the sewing machine was still half a century away, and every other element of this outfit would have been sewn by hand.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has even been kind enough to include an image of how the petticoat and spencer attach: with little holes worked in the waistband of the petticoat, and hooks on the jacket which slip through them.

How does this sit with you? Do you enjoy the mix of light froth, and more severe tailoring? Do you appreciate the way the outfit mixes a whole variety of elements: florals and new technologies, historicism and patriotism? Or would it have been better to stick with one theme.

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10

A reminder about rating — feel free to be critical if you don’t like a thing, but make sure that your comments aren’t actually insulting to those who do like a garment. Phrase criticism as your opinion, rather than a flat fact. Our different tastes are what make Rate the Dress so interesting. It’s no fun when a comment implies that anyone who doesn’t agree with it, or who would wear a garment, is totally lacking in taste.

(as usual, nothing more complicated than a .5. I also hugely appreciate it if you only do one rating, and set it on a line at the very end of your comment