Meet the newest Scroop Pattern: the Eastbourne Trousers!
With two lengths, two yoke options, the ability to go from casual to work to glam depending on the fabric, really clever sewing techniques that deliver a lot of impact for your much sewing effort, and HUGE POCKETS, these are pretty awesome trousers!
(at least we think so!)
The Eastbourne Trousers are named for the lovely coastal suburb of Eastbourne, which sits on the eastern shore of Wellington Harbour.
The area is famous for its forests of native plants, beautiful bays, cute period cottages, and sheltered beaches.
It was a popular summer retreat for well-off Wellingtonians, including Katherine Mansfield’s family, in the late 19th and early 20th century, and is still an ideal place to escape the pressures of city life. The areas vintage charm and relaxed feel are perfectly captured in the Eastbourne Trousers.
The pattern comes in the full Scroop Patterns size range, from 34″-56″ hips
When we bought our lovely little cottage four years ago, the master bedroom was painted purple floor to ceiling. It was awful*. When I saw today’s Rate the Dress it instantly reminded me of our previously-purple bedroom: not because it is necessarily awful, even really the same colour, but because it is a lot of purple, and because friends said of our bedroom “that colour might be really nice in something else, but not as a bedroom.”**
It was very easy to tell what people would give as a rating for last week’s dress, depending on what words you used for it. Those who found it ‘subtle’ or ‘delicate’ or ‘refined’ rated it above an 8, those who felt it was ‘blah’ or ‘washed out’ or a ‘sack’ gave it significantly less.
side note: Catherine says it was a rice cake: healthful but not appealing. I happen to adore rice cakes. And a whole host of other very delicately flavoured foods with dry crunchy textures. My sister once tried a new cracker, said “Ugh, this tastes just like cardboard” and then handed the packet to me and said “Here, you’ll love them”. She was not wrongThey are now my favourite crackers – preferably eaten with goats cheese or avocade, which are also ‘you either love it or you don’t’ tastes. But also totally lovely plain. Taste is so subjective! As our rating is about to show…
The Total: 7.3 out of 10
Not a universal palette pleaser then!
This week: a shot purple dress and matching cape
Now that I’ve rather put you off the dress by comparing it to the extraordinarily terrible paint job our poor bedroom once suffered from, let me assure you that other than being a lot of the same general colour, this dress has nothing in common with the bedroom. It is, in fact, one of my favourite shades of purple!
As a fashion colour we usually associate purple hues with the end of the 1850s, and the invention of aniline dyes. However, fashion plates and news articles make it clear that the colour was already becoming popular before the discovery of mauvine: Perkin’s breakthrough just helped to extend the hues notability and longevity.
This dress, with it’s perky green trim, and Victoria’s similarly hued festive frock for her daughters wedding, are evidence that another prevailing fashion history myth, that all purple and lavender clothes were half-mourning, is just that: a myth.
Fashionable woman wore different shades of purple to various celebratory events throughout the 19th and into the early 20th century without any association with mourning. There were a number of things that signalled that a woman was in mourning, or half mourning, and they went well beyond setting aside an entire colour segment exclusively for half mourning.
Day dress and cape of shot silk, early 1850s, The John Bright Historic Costume Collection
So, it’s not a mourning dress, and it’s not necessarily awful at all! It is a fabric that rumples and shows every crease very easily, and age has not helped that, so please don’t mark it down for its current presentation.
What do you think of all the purpleness?
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. 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, so I can find it! And 0 is not on a scale of 1 to 10. Thanks in advance!)
* So awful that the day we took ownership I sat in the car in front of the house waiting for the realtor to show up – with paint and rollers already in the backseat. I carried them in along with our new keys!
** It was a particularly unfortunate choice of purple as a floor to ceiling bedroom. I might have been more forgiving had it been the shade of this dress!
In making my Frou Frou Francaise, I knew I wanted extremely lush, frilly, lace engageantes. It matches the overall aesthetic of the dress, and is by far the most common type of engageantes represented in artworks featuring francaise in the 1750s & 60s.
Engageantes in Art
There are exquisite lace examples like this:
Marquise de Caumont la Force (detail), 1767, Fran̤ois Hubert Drouais, Ball State University РMuncie, Indiana USA
And embroidered net examples like this:
Portrait of a Woman, said to be Madame Charles Simon Favart (Marie Justine Benoîte Duronceray, 1727—1772) François Hubert Drouais (French, Paris 1727—1775 Paris), 1757, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
And generally just lots of lush froth like this:
An Unknown Lady at the Spinett, Johann Heinrich Tischbein d.Ä. (1753)
And this:
Allan Ramsay (1713—1784), Portrait of Horace Walpole’s Nieces- The Honorable Laura Keppel and Charlotte, Lady Huntingtower (detail), 1765
And this:
Allan Ramsay (1713—1784), Portrait of Horace Walpole’s Nieces- The Honorable Laura Keppel and Charlotte, Lady Huntingtower (detail), 1765
And this:
Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, Johan Zoffany, 1765
And, of course, most of all, the glorious example of lace engageantes shown in the portrait of Queen Charlotte that was one of my original inspiration images for my francaise:
Allan Ramsay (1713—1784), Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) with her two eldest sons (detail), 1765, Windsor CastleAllan Ramsay (1713—1784), Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) with her two eldest sons (detail), 1765, Windsor Castle
Finding suitable lace:
The first thing I was going to need to make really gorgeous, lush engageantes was gorgeous, lush lace.
Perfectly in time for my search for the ideal lace, silkworld.com.au began selling fabric retail, not just wholesale, and they offered me some lace to make something out of to help advertise their new retail line.
I was phenomenally excited by the offer and delighted to help, because SilkWorld is the only place in the Antipodes that sells silk tulle (aka, the holy grail of historical costuming) and its equally covetable cousin, cotton tulle, on a regular basis.
(I’m just popular enough to get a fair amount of offers of free products in exchange for blog and instagram posts, but I turn most of them down, because I’m not going to tell you about something unless I’m pretty excited about it.)
It is nylon, but not at all scratchy and stiff, and the motifs and overall amount of motif and open space was the best match to my inspiration images.
The lace arrived, and it did not disappoint (neither did the silk tulle I also got, which is like unicorn dreams and angel kisses and was clearly woven by fairies – I can’t wait to use it)
So, now that I had wonderful lace to work with, how was I going to get a lace fabric with a straight scalloped edge to work as engageantes, which usually have curved edges?
Figuring out the Pattern
Some of the examples of frilly engagenates that I showed above are clearly embroidered net with edgings of straight lace attached, and it’s possible that other examples are cotton lawn with extremely lush whitework, like this example from the Met:
Both of those construction styles allow the shaping of the engageante to be built into the construction: cut a straight edge to gather to the sleeve, and a scalloped or rounded edge to finish with whitework or a lace edging.
The lace edging method is similar to the type of engageante shown in the American Duchess 18th century book, which is what I used for my first attempt at sleeve ruffles for this francaise. Pretty, but not quite what I’m going for:
I want a fully lace engageante, which means working with lace with a straight scalloped edge – not something that can be cut to curve in along the scallops.
So, how to make that type of engageante?
In-period the lace would have made specifically for engageantes, with narrower ends, and wider centres, as surviving examples show:
But that isn’t possible with standard purchased lace, because the decorative scalloped border is along a straight edge.
To create the curve of engageantes, what I did is flip the standard engageante shape.
Here is a pattern for engageantes, from Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion. The original is made in embroidered lawn:
I traced off the basic shape (in blue) and then reduced the changes in height, to match what you see in extant examples, resulting in my pink pattern pieces.
I wanted a three-ruffle engageant, so I used my two pattern pieces to create a third piece, halfway between the two – I also extended the top ruffle’s circumference length by an inch, so all three ruffles were the same, as it made them much easier to work with.
This gave me a basic pattern template:
Then I flipped the template:
And cut my ruffles with the straight edge of my template/pattern along my scalloped lace border:
Cutting & Sewing:
I cut my bottom two ruffles with the extremely detailed, scalloped border, and my uppermost ruffle with the slightly simpler border on the other edge of the fabric – just to give a bit more dimensionality to the engageantes.
Then I stacked my three layers together:
And gathered along the curved edge:
I sewed the curved edge to a tape, and basted the tape into the sleeves of my francaise, so it’s easily removable for washing, or to put on another francaise.
And there are my engageantes!
I’m really happy with what an extravagant bit of froth they give at the ends of the sleeves. I could have made them even fuller – but they are rather glorious as they are.
The Challenge:#12 Neglected Challenge — re-doing #9 ‘Hands & Feet’. It seems only right to include this for that challenge, as I literally re-made the engageantes I did for it!
Fabric: 1.5m lace
Pattern: my own, as above
Year: ca. 1760
Notions: thread, cotton tape
How historically accurate is it?:Nylon lace and a re-think of how to cut a pattern? Maybe 40% However, it’s as close as you’re going to get unless you are embroidering silk tulle or doing elaborate whitework on lawn.
Hours to complete: 2
First worn:for photos in early December
Total cost: Free, but only because I was given the lace (thank you silkworld.com.au!
