Valencia, specifically. So, I am forcing myself to Stay On Target and am starting the Maja dress! What, you may be asking, is this? Oh, only a costume that I’ve been saying I’m going to make for about three years.
To recap: it’s a mid-1770s (c. 1773? 1775? I’ve seen conflicting dates, gotta look into that more) portrait of the Marquese de Llano wearing a masquerade costume of a Maja. Majas/Majos were working class people who lived in Madrid in the late 18th and 19th centuries. They spoke “pure” Castilian, wore elaborate outfits, and had a general swagger and bravado that captured the imagination of Spain. In time, their clothing became adopted as the national traditional dress of Spain.
So in doing all this research on the style, I found a ton of cool resources, and then stumbled across Las Fallas, which is a big annual festival held in Valencia. Why is this exciting? Because they wear E-LAB-ORATE “traditional Spanish dress”… which is based on late 18th century Maja costumes. Of course, it’s morphed over time, but it is totally gorgeous. To wit:
I mean seriously, where do I sign up??? The hair! The jewelry! The fabrics! The 18th c. silhouette! Aiee!!!
There is, of course, a whole industry in Valencia around these costumes… but a whole lot of searching later, and it looks like not much of it is online. Bah – I had gotten all excited about buying some shoes, like these (and I think Trystan needs these!).
Phew! With the first of what will probably be a few posts:
The Costume Accessories Symposium was faaabulous. So many interesting research presentations, so many lovely people to meet. Plus, chances to dress up and run around Colonial Williamsburg!
First, my outfits! Everything came together relatively well. I finished most of the habit shirt ruffles and cravat on the plane, although I didn’t have sleeve ruffles until day 2.
I had been planning to do cream bows on the Brunswick, but at the last minute came across some vintage blue ribbon in my stash, and had the genius idea to use that instead. I was seriously not wanting to wear the Brunswick — I was worried I was going to look like a combination of Aunt Pittypat and a butterchurner. Luckily, when I put it all together I actually quite liked it, and then when I put the hat on, I loved it. Yay!
Friday night was an in-costume dinner at the King’s Arms, followed by a chamber music performance, organized by Barbee. It was really lovely, as almost everyone was in costume, the food was good, and the music was gorgeous. Both venues were only lit by candles — be still my beating heart! And afterwards we had dessert at a local home. I got to meet Abby (shout out: I had no idea that wasn’t a wig! We kept calling you “the girl with the fabulous wig,” guess we gotta revise that!) and talk rumps, and Gwendolyn and talk about her work at the Costume Design Center. I wore my “this old thing” peach francaise.
Saturday was riding habit day. I loved this outfit too, despite the ginormous wrinkle that developed at my bust point (WTF?). I felt all sporting (in the 18th c. sense) and tailored, and it was fun to wear it with others in their habits(es) as well. I wore the habit again for dinner on Monday night.
For some reason this picture makes me happy - I feel like an 18th c. woman on the Grand Tour, looking at antiquities!
I wore the same hat & wig with all of my outfits. I really wanted to make one of the black hats with tons of feathers that I see in so many riding habit portraits; I was particularly lusting after Lady Worsley‘s hat. Thanks to all of your good advice, I ended up getting the wool felt hat blank from JAS Townsend in the largest size they had, which as you can see isn’t large enough to really settle down on my wig as far as the hats in portraits, but it worked. I did the most craptastic job shaping the brim — I couldn’t find anything in my house that was the right shape, so I used a series of bowls and just moved them around as I steamed the crap out of the hat. Then I covered it in black feathers, some of which blew weird ways in the wind, but I finally figured out how to attach them so that by riding habit day, the hat was looking like what I wanted.
For the wig, I took apart one I had styled before. I really wanted that particular style that you see around 1779-81 (example), which is somewhere between a pouf and a hedgehog. I made a lower form than I normally do for a pouf, and ginormous curls.
In the next post, I’ll talk about the symposium and the exhibition! In the meantime, you can see all of my photos on Flickr.
I am totally on target for getting everything done in reasonable time for Williamsburg, which, yay! I have finished most of the big stuff, and am now down to fiddly bits. I think I’m even going to have a day or half-day to pack, which is SUPER exciting.
I have been motoring on the riding habit, and I have to say I’m kind of rediscovering the joy of sewing machines — in that I am SUPER excited about this outfit, and if I hadn’t decided to machine sew it, it never would have happened in time. So, sewing machines ARE good when you need them!
I finished putting the jacket together, attaching the collar and the skirts. I did screw up slightly in the jacket skirt pleats, in that I decided to round down the bottom of the back hemline, and just added from the pleats to the CB — but didn’t change the pleat hemline… so the pleats don’t line up with the jacket hemline. I started trying to futz with them to make them line up with the hemline, but it totally threw off the width of the pleats, and meant that the skirts no longer matched up width-wise with the jacket. So I decided it was okay less than perfect, and just went ahead as patterned.
The sleeves were SLEEVIL. EVIL EVIL EVIL. I looked at the riding habit pattern in Janet Arnold and thought, “Okay, wrist-length two-piece sleeve, that’s doable.” I looked through my pattern stash to find something to start with, and realized that I had made a similar style pattern for my chemise gown. So I started futzing with it, and futzing with it, and futzing with it, and FOUR HOURS LATER (okay, I might be exaggerating) I had a pattern that I was close to happy with. Then, I looked at the riding habit pattern in Norah Waugh, where it finally dawned on me that the sleeve top and bottom pattern are supposed to be exactly the same. DUH. Somehow I hadn’t read that in the Arnold layout. So I took my sleeve top pattern, which looked closer to the period cuts, traced off two, and fit those making sure to make even changes b/t top and bottom. Took me less than an hour. Le sigh!
The skirt was relatively quick, except I was lazy and didn’t measure my stash ON my body for my waist measurement — so the skirt is a good 3″ too small in the waistband. It fits, due to 18th c. waist finishing techniques, but if I can find the time, I will unpick it and repleat it a bit wider — otherwise you can see some of my red quilted petticoat showing through!
Warning: these are TERRIBLE pictures, I know, but you can see where I was at a few days ago. Winston really wanted to participate in the picture taking, hence my blurry arm:
So I am sewing madly for Williamsburg, and one of the outfits I want to bring with is my 1760s Brunswick. Because I’m assuming it will be cold, so I want outfits that cover me up!
I’ve been working on trimming the Brunswick in fits and starts. I’ve actually been amazed at how quickly it’s gone, but then I’ll leave it for a month, so I’ve been bad about updates.
As I mentioned in this post, I found two paintings featuring Brunswicks that I’m drawing on for the trimming pattern. I started doing the jacket as in the first painting, but it was getting too froofy, and I had only trimmed the waistcoat and sleeves! I left it and thought about it a lot, and finally decided to take some of the trim off of the sleeve. Unlike most other 18th c. dress styles, Brunswicks often have at least one row of vertical trim on the sleeves; many have more. My inspiration pic had at least three, but it was just throwing it over the edge into massive pouf-y land — and I’m not a massively poufy girl! So I took off two of the rows on the sleeve, and then finally finished the trimming on the jacket.
I have serious plans for trimming the skirt, and have even started making a raft of ruches to do that… but given looming deadlines, I had a (slow) genius moment the other day when I realized — wait, I don’t HAVE to trim the skirt to make this outfit wearable! Sure, it will be better with skirt trim, but it’s not REQUIRED. I long ago cut out the skirt, sewed together panels, and hemmed it; I was waiting on pleating/attaching the waist until I had done the trimming. But now that I’ve realized that I don’t HAVE to have that done for Williamsburg, I’m going to go ahead and finish the skirt and wear it untrimmed (for now).
Here’s the Brunswick jacket, as it was when I had lots of sleeve trim, and here is the finished jacket (minus some basting threads that need to be pulled out):
Bridget and I recently wrote an article detailing our experiences with making the Eugenie project for the Silicon Web Costumers Guild’s newsletter. The issue is now open to anyone, so if you’re interested, check it out: go here, click on “Current Issue,” then Vol. 8 Issue 4.
