So the Brunswick project languished as I simply could not find a trimming idea I liked. When I made the dress, I had decided I liked the longer 1760s waistcoat style, so that meant I needed to find a curvilinear trimming pattern to suit that era… but all the ideas that came to mind, and portraits that I liked, were more simple/straight 1770s styles (oh the woes of an attempted-historical-purist). So, languish it did!
Until I recently rechecked one of those sources that I never look at anymore, because there are so many newer and spanglier resources out there — Visual History of Costume — which, whoa, had tons of portraits of Brunswicks in it! Okay, maybe 3-4, but that’s tons! And I found two from the 1760s that I really liked (sadly, can’t find color images online), which gave me good ideas for trimming the waistcoat and the skirt. So I’ve cut out a bunch of self-fabric strips, and now I have a whole lot of whipped gathering to do.
Important side note: it’s embarrassing to admit, but until very recently, I didn’t know about whipped gathers *hangs head in shame*. I could never figure out why my hand gathering looked like crap compared to extant 18th c. garments — the gathering never looked as controlled or tight, no matter my stitch length. Oh, well, maybe that’s because they didn’t just do a running stitch… Sigh! Oh well, at least now I know, and I am liking my gathering SO much better!
What do you mean by whipped gathers? A gathering stitch? I’m not English and not every term is easy to find an explanation of.
Good question, since I only recently found out! Katherine has a good video here that shows how to do it on a hemmed piece: http://vimeo.com/13284470
If you’re doing it on a ruched strip of fabric, you would fold the fabric in half, do a long whipstitch down the fold, and then gather that up. I’ll try to take a picture to show what it looks like!
Wow, whipped gathers; I had no idea either. Thanks for posting this! Do you think this works for late Victorian too?
I think by late Victorian, if you mean 1870s onwards, they’d be doing gathering by machine — that’s why bustle dresses have all that crazy trimming, because you can do so much more by machine!