My old one was getting dingy and the opening ripped, plus I’d only ever made one, plus it was long enough that I often needed to do unladylike maneuvers to get things out. Now I’ve got a new, shorter, wider pair!
Getting Ready for France!
So I leave for Paris in one week — EEK! I realized this the other night and thought I’d better get my butt in gear in getting everything ready. I’m not making anything new, but because these should be the Best Costume Events Evah! I want to have some great accessories.
I’m putting together a couple of elements for the ball, but I didn’t have any ostrich feathers in colors I liked. Quelle horreur! I did have some gold ones, but when I held them up with some white for contrast, they suddenly looked all natural/beige-y, which is not a look I wanted. I remembered that you can dye feathers with Kool-Aid, so off to the grocery store I went! Here’s what I ended up with — original gold color on the left, the same gold covered with Black Cherry Kool-Aid:
I also want a fabulous hat for the day event. I’m bringing a really huge pouf because, hey, it’s FRANCE! And I don’t have any good hats that fit over that. So I took the hat that SHOULD have been made to go over a 1770’s pouf, but got sidetracked into a 1780s style — and which I have never worn. Obviously it wasn’t meant to be! So I pulled some of the trim off and reshaped/retrimmed it. I had a HARD time figuring out colors. It’s going with the red & white polonaise, and the only things in my stash that worked were blues or greens. I ended up going green — it’s not perfect, but I wanted something a little more pastel because that’s what feels appropriate. The vintage glass berries are there to tie in with the dress — hopefully it will work!
Maja waistcoat – mockup #3
Okay, third mockup with an angled flap! I spent some time drawing out the spangle pattern for the waistcoat, although I still have to do the facing (which folds over). I ordered sequins like 2 years ago from MJ Trim in oyster white and matte black — and looking at them today, I realized — duh, these are supposed to look like metal! Matte black totally doesn’t work. Now I checked their site and it doesn’t look like they have the color I need in the size I originally ordered (8mm), so I may need to order more in 6mm. Luckily, they’re not too expensive!
Maja waistcoat: aha!
I was peering at the copy of this painting in “Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” and it’s actually a slightly clearer copy — and what I noticed there, which you can’t see in the scan I have on my site, is that there is a very faint line of the spangle decoration that angles up from the top of the bottoms & loops to that folded back corner. Aha! So it IS angled, and I think actually closes a bit further over than I currently have it — off to monkey with my current pattern.
And, thank god for protractors — even so, drawing the wave pattern for the spangles has been waaaay too fiddly!
Beginning the Maja!
Or, peering at high resolution scans and trying to figure out wth is going on there!
So I am nearly done binding my new stays, but while I wait for a bit more silk ribbon to show up in the mail, I decided to get started on my big project for the summer: the c. 1775 Maja fancy dress costume. I’m going to drape the waistcoat, then it will be on to spangle embroidery land! I figure I may switch off between draping further sections and what should be endless spangle-ing.
Here’s mockup #1 and 2. I obviously worked a lot from the original painting, but also used this jacket from the Museo del Traje as a reference for the back. I found a lot of paintings (like this Goya) that show even narrower back seams… but those all appear to be from the 1790s, so I thought this seemed more reasonable.
The hitch? WTH is going on with the front? It looks all fine and dandy, until you realize that there appears to be a center front opening closed with buttons and loops on the bottom half, but on the top half there’s a wide overlap that’s falling back! So, uh, how does it close? I poked around and none of the images I can find of extant garments from Spain in this era, or maja paintings, show anything similar. The closest thing I could find was this 1777 drawing of a maja, which has an asymmetrical front flap opening — but that’s on the jacket, not the waistcoat!
Peering and peering at the original painting, I’ve semi-decided that the waistcoat must close center front, but then have a flap that overlaps near the top. There is a button that’s sort of shadowed that COULD be in line with the other center front buttons, or maybe is further over and so could be the bottom edge of this flap? The only other alternative is that the center front buttons/loops are non-functional, and the bodice overlaps really far over — but that seems impractical, as it would be hard to fit that wide of an overlap. Right now, the overlapped top that I’ve draped is in a square shape, but it just occurred to me that it COULD be angled from the CF line up to the overlap (so more of a triangle shape).
What do you think? How would you drape this sucker?
