Renn Fest Coat - Planning and Resizing

Hello lovelies,

My next project that I am actively working on is a piece for the Renaissance Festival. I live in MD, and the Renaissance Festival here is a big deal every summer/fall. I have been going since I was little - I still have two flower crowns I got from the Fest about 10-15 years ago - and I've always wanted to make a costume piece for it. Since I've been advancing on my sewing skills, I figured now was the time to try.

I chose a pattern I bought during a McCalls sale to make the coat:

McCall's 6819 - OUAT Inspired

This pattern is inspired by Once Upon a Time costumes, namely Snow White's popular white walking coat from Season 1.

She so cute.

I watched the first few seasons of the show, but lost interest. The costumes, however, are AMAZING, and I adore them. I fell in love with this particular costume the first time I saw it on screen, so I bought the pattern. I love the lines and the cut of the coat, plus the skirt is perfect for a feminine yet very practical costume, especially for walking around a Renn Festival.

The pattern has two options for a coat. View A is a sleeveless vest with front tabs and constructed all from the same fabric, and View B is a sleeved coat with peplum bottom and contrasting skirt. I'm combining elements of both coats: I'm using most of View A, but adding peplum pieces, and using a contrast fabric for the skirt.



The pattern calls for ~6yds for the whole coat, but I didn't have enough fabric to make the whole coat out of one fabric, so I'm making the top and bottom portions of the coat with two different blue fabrics. I'm going to make the coat portion out of a blue-gray cotton jacquard I got on clearance at Joann's. It's a beautiful medium weight woven jacquard, and when the pattern catches the light sometimes it almost has a purple-gray color to it.



~3yds for $8 - hell yes

The skirt will be made out of a set of old darker blue cotton curtains my mom gave me, since she was otherwise going to get rid of them. It's about 80"L x 63"W for both panels, which equals almost 4.5yds. The pattern calls for about 4yds of fabric for the skirt. Free fabric is the best.The

The blue is darker than it looks in the photo.

The lining of the coat will be an off-white linen I received as a gift from a friend. The skirt will probably also be lined with the dark blue cotton. The interfacing will probably be cotton buckram, which I have plenty of, and I like the stiffness of buckram without having to fuse interfacing to the fabric. The goal is to make a pretty coat that is also functional and comfortable, hence why I am using cotton and/or linen fabrics.

I'm still on the fence about making the Corset A as well, but I also found a free Corset Belt pattern from CorsetTraining.net that I am interested in putting together. If you haven't checked out this website, the author has some cool patterns, and the Corset Belt pattern is free and relatively easy. It's also reversible!

I have the Sizes 14-22 of McCalls 6819, bought when I was little...healthier, so to speak. I knew I would have to resize this pattern, since I always have to resize commercial patterns for me. Problem is, I have also lost over 30lbs since April 2017, and I plan to lose more, so I need to make a coat that can technically be resized again in the future. Luckily I have experience in resizing.

I took the pattern and traced it on newsprint, using the size 14 for the jacket, the peplum pieces and also the Corset A pattern pieces. There are 4 main pattern pieces for both coats A and B, with a fitted bodice and curved seams over the bust areas. There are also 4 pieces for the peplum, 4 pieces for corset A, and 2 pieces for the skirt. I then traced and cut out the pattern on white muslin in my stash and pinned it all together.


The result? It was HUGE.


The length of the jacket was great, almost perfect for my torso. The width, however, was ridiculously large. I had at least 6-7 inches of overlap. And according to the pattern sizes on the envelope, with my measurements I should be cutting a size 20-22. Um, what?!

So I started adjusting the mock-up. I took in the front seams by 1in on both front and side front pieces, for a total of 4 inches. Right below the collar opening of the jacket, I took it in only .75in on each side, to smooth out the bunching in the front and back.

Resizing areas marked in blue (1in)

I also took in the center back seam by 1 inch on both sides, so 2 inches total. The side back seams I took in by 1/2in each on each side back piece.

Resizing areas marked in blue (1in) and green (.5in)

This resulted in an actually fitted jacket, and it was rather flattering as well.


Mock-up after adjustments. It's much more comfortable now.

Might need to add a boob dart here...(Please excuse the bathroom backdrop lol)

There's still a little bit of bunching in the back and on the sides, but it's still much more comfortable than the original fitting.

The next post will be the actual cutting and piecing of the final product.



18th Century Stays - Part 4 - Finale

Hello everyone!

This is the final post for the 18th century stays, and I'll post photos of the completed stays at the end!
If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

This was also the beginning of my waking nightmare.

So, as I said in the previous post, I hate hand stitching. Well, hated is more appropriate...I'm more tolerant of it now, but still. When I started these stays, I had no idea how much hand stitching was involved with stays until I got to this point.

In the last post, I had just finished whip stitching the seams of the panels down into the stays, and I was surprised by how much the insides of my stays were actually starting to look like stays! I assumed I was heading in the right direction.

Now, I've also mentioned previously that prior planning is important. And I did not take into account how long the hand stitching would take. When I started the final parts of construction, I had about exactly 7 days to finish my stays before my living history event. Now this might seem like a lot of time, but I work full time, so I had only about 5 hours in the evening to work on these during the week. And despite spending almost an entire weekend just hand stitching, I still was finishing these up the night before.  And I'm pretty sure I injured my hand with my furious hand stitching.

So, a piece of advice - DON'T BE ME.

So here's the final part of the stays adventure!

After whip stitching the seams down, I decided to start stitching the tabs. In Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial for her stays, she used a strip of Ultrasuede to cover her tabs and bind her stays instead of leather strips. Ultrasuede is a type of upholstery fabric that is an artificial substitute for suede leather, and it's a little cheaper than actual leather (if you know where to look). So, like her tutorial, I found 1/8yd of brown Ultrasuede about 9" wide on Ebay for cheap. I also found a wonderful website called twilltape.com and bought 2 sizes of natural heavyweight cotton twill tape - 3/8" wide and 1/2" wide. I've added the links so you can check the website out - I got a 72yd roll of the 1/2" tape for $6.90, so not too shabby. I ordered these actually while I was still inserting the boning, so I didn't have to delay too long.

I took the brown Ultrasuede and cut it to the shape of all the tabs. I hadn't cut open my tabs at this point - the plan was to cut them once I had the suede stitched down.

I didn't leave any seam allowance - the suede is like leather when cut, so you don't have to fold over the fabric for a hem.

Lots of stitching, and a big headache.

In this photo you can see my running stitch along the edges of the 1/8" seam allowance on the tabs. I wanted to leave very little fabric so I could stitch the twill tape later. On the top edge of the Ultrasuede, I had to do a modified running stitch - I took the thread and stitched it over top of the boning, and then on the visible side of the fabric, I did a couple of back stitches along the stitching of the boning channels. It essentially tacked down the Ultrasuede without making messy stitches on the outside of the stays. You can see that in the photo as well.

Once the Ultrasuede was finished on both sides of the stays, I moved on to the eyelets. Now, I cheated here - I decided to use metal eyelets and stitch over them with button thread. I had an old pair of stays that actually had metal grommets with thread stitched over top. So I bought a couple of packs of 5/32" nickel eyelets from both Michaels and Joann's, along with an Eyelet hand tool.

In Rococo Atelier's final part of her tutorial, she mentions spiral lacing and spacing the eyelets out in a pattern that better facilitates spiral lacing. And when I first read this, I had NO IDEA what spiral lacing was. So, on to Google I went, and I discovered that it was, in fact, a thing. I also discovered that, through more research and a blog post by Festive Attyre, it was the most common way to lace up clothing in the 18th century. I also only wanted to use one piece of lacing cord for front and back.

So I marked the first side of my stays with fabric pencil and spaced them about 1inch apart, except for the last two - those were spaced about 1/2 inch apart, to create the zig-zag pattern and to create an anchor at the end of the lacing cord.  I was fortunate that my eyelets were small - the space I left for the eyelets was not very wide, and I would have to space the eyelets 1" apart in order to fit all the eyelets I needed.

Rococo Atelier also discusses how many eyelets you need - it seems to depend on the length of the front and back panels of your stays, and how far from each other you're going to place your holes. I decided on 1 inch distance, and my stays are ~13in long in the front, and about 15-16in in the back. So after looking at some extant stays, I went with 12 eyelets in the front and 14 in the back. She also has an illustration where the last eyelet is parallel to the top of the tabs. I decided to go a little farther than at the line of the tabs, after looking at Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial.

You can see here how I went from nickel eyelets to "thread" eyelets. You can also see the spacing I did for the eyelets, especially the last two eyelets. I button-hole stitched the eyelets with my button thread, and doubled the thread up to make it thicker.

As I was finishing up stitching the eyelets, I realized I'd forgotten to do something. In almost all of the extant stays I'd reviewed, they all had little strips of cloth along the seams of the panels. In Koshka-the-Cat's tutorial, she mentions that 'Before binding, I sewed a 1/8" piece of cotton tape to each seam.'

Well, crap.

The smallest cotton tape I had was 3/8" tape, and it was waaaay too wide for that. So, after cursing myself for giving myself more work, I took the 3/8" tape and measured it to the length of the seams, cut it, and then folded it in half, basting it along the length. Then I stitched it down to the seams...and holy crap was it painful. I started to wish I'd constructed each panel separately, and then whipstitch the panels together. But the result was wonderful - they really started to look like stays at this point!

Stays have the tabs stitched, and the cotton tape is sewn in. 

I was getting close to the end - I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a very looong tunnel.

Now it was time to bind the stays. I decided to bind the top of the stays first - considering there were less twists and turns. I used Ultrasuede here as well. I used 1yd of 45" wide tan Ultrasuede - I bought more Ultrasuede on Ebay because I thought the brown Ultrasuede wouldn't arrive on time. But it did, so I had double the Ultrasuede. Oops. I cut the tan Ultrasuede into 2 1" wide strips.

I turned on my Amazon Video in the background and set to work.

Like Koshka-the-Cat, I whip stitched the edge of the ultrasuede to the right side of the stays, and then folded it over and whip stitched it to the back of the stays, to give it the appearance of a narrow binding on the front.

This side of the Ultrasuede stitched to the inside is much wider than the outside.

This went fairly quickly - I like whip stitching more than other hand stitches, and since there wasn't too much coordinating over multiple folds and turns, it was easier to do.

Then I moved to binding the tabs.

This wasn't difficult for me to do, really - in fact, it was kind of fun after a while to bind around all of the corners. It just took a long time.

I took the 1/2" twill tape and folded it in half, covering the edges of the tabs evenly, with the cut end folded over to keep it from fraying. I then whip stitched it through the fabric on the tabs. This made it much easier to do, and folding the tabs evenly meant the whip stitching was almost invisible. I didn't pre-cut the tape - I just took the end of the 72yd roll and started stitching until I reached the end of the tabs, and then cut it and folded it over to finish.

Lots of hours, whip stitching, thread, and cotton tape.

This took time, and my poor hand hated me, but I finished, and damn did it look nice! The 1/2" tape was just wide enough to bind it without looking too wide on the outside. The narrower tape also made it easier to fold over the corners and curves without bunching too much.

The very last thing was to line the insides of the stays. I bought 5yds of some middle-weight linen on sale from Fabrics-store.com. It's a great site to buy all kinds of linen in many, many colors. And they have sales all the time. The exact linen I used was IL019 BLEACHED - FS Signature Finish, in case you want to look it up. It's an off-white linen that is super soft, and just the right weight to line my stays.

I traced the edges of my stays on the linen, minus the tabs, and cut it out. I didn't cut it quite as long as I wanted, as I found out, but I made it work. Once I did that, I folded over the raw edges and pined them to the inside of the stays. On the sides, I running stitched the linen to the boning channels seams. On the top and bottom, I whip stitched it to the Ultrasuede and the buckram. Easy peasy.

Here's the insides of the stays:

And here's photos of the front of the stays, all finished!

In summary, these stays are the most comfortable I've ever worn. I'd never made something that actually fit me before now, and to have the stays not only fit, but be comfortable, was a blessing. They also look really nice - much closer to extant stays examples than I expected. I am pretty proud of these. I adore the colors, and I can't wait to use the rest of the blue fabric in another project.

I learned a lot about sewing and costuming on this project, especially fitting and resizing. I became more proficient in hand stitching, which will save me a lot of headaches in the future. It also made me more confident in my costuming skills, especially with the more complicated aspects of costuming.

Another positive outcome of this adventure was the sudden love of research. I'd never researched costumes as religiously as I did for this project, but it inspired me to not only continue my 18th century sewing and costuming for my hobby, but also to read and research first before making historical clothing in the future. Now I've caught the bug something fierce, and I'm not stopping.

Thanks for reading! I hoped you enjoyed reading these posts as much as I did writing them! As always, comments and constructive critiques are appreciated!

Also, let me know if you have any project you might want me to try next!

18th Century Stays - Part 3 - Construction (cont.)

Hi again!

And we're back to the making of the stays!

In the last post, I started making the final product, and I completed all of the general construction parts. Now, on to everyone's favorite part - inserting the boning!

(Cue sarcasm)

Oh my LORD was this a pain in the butt. For me, it was THE most frustrating part of this whole endeavor. I'm pretty sure this part gave me the beginnings of carpal tunnel.

So before I start ranting about it, I want to go into how I did my boning.

I took 2 pieces of cut reed, put the flat sides together, and inserted them into each marked channel. If you remember in a previous post, I marked the channels so I only did every 2 boning channels.

Reed, reed, more reed...

So, fun side story, and by fun I mean infuriating:

As I was trying to insert the boning, I originally tried doing only one piece of boning at a time...and it didn't quite work. The boning would fight me the whole way into the channel, and I broke several, several reeds in the process. I had a couple of rage-quit moments for a few days. Then I re-read Koshka-the-Cat's post, and she mentioned putting 2 reeds in one channel. When I was reading up on Wm. Booth Draper's site, they also mention in their product page for 3/16" boning that it works best to place 2 reeds in one channel if the boning is skinny. So I tried that...and the boning went in much smoother.

Now, it was still tight as all-get-out. This was mostly my fault, because I probably should have stuck with 3/8" boning channels instead of 5/16" channels. And I had to push some of the reeds in with the pliers on my Swiss Army Knife so...in the future, I will try the 3/8" boning channels with 2 reeds FIRST before making the channels smaller.

So after doing the boning in all the panels, I still had to finish stitching some of the panels together. This was because the openings of the boning channels in the middle panels overlapped with the seam lines for the panels themselves (prior planning was not my friend here). So I did that...

I stitched down the seams for the middle panels here, after I finished inserting all of the reed in said panels.

I then took the leftover seam allowances on the top of the stays and I folded it over the openings of the boning channels, baste-stitching them down. This bound the stays so the boning wouldn't slide out and I could breathe a little easier. This was also the point where I decided to not have shoulder straps, so I cut off the excess fabric at the tops and made it strapless.

...And then moved on to the breast cross-pieces.

So, these were not mentioned before, because I didn't really decided on them until this point in construction (again, prior planning...). In American Duchess' blog post about boning patterns, she mentions that some stays had horizontal boning to add more support to the bust. And these pieces were often sewn in as separate pockets. Luckily, I had just enough buckram left over. So, I traced the top of the center front panel pattern on my leftover buckram, and then cut it down to about 5-6 inches long.

Two layers of buckram, and curved channels for boobies.

I drew in curved boning channels to follow the curves of the boobage. I cut the buckram to just long enough to sew into the outer edge of the second straight boning channel in the stays - the channel closest to the eyelets (you'll see what I mean later). This size made the pockets just big enough to cover the boobage without overlapping the lacing. Once I had all the boning channels drawn, I cut both sides out and stitched the boning channels together like before.

Ready to stitch!

Channels are stitched!

Then I put the boning in the channels, and they were ready to sew it into the stays!

Before I stitched these into the stays, I decided to sew a little design in the open channels of the center front panels. I came up with the inspiration from looking at a couple Pins of stays, such as this, this, and Koshka-the-Cat's 1780s stays. She has a lovely criss-cross stitching pattern in the open channels of the stays. So I got a little fancy and did that in several open channels with the cotton thread. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have for time purposes - I was coming very close time-wise to my deadline and I really didn't have the time to do this, but I didn't care. You'll see pictures of the stitching in the final photos. :)

I used the same button thread I used before to stitch each boob pocket. I first stitched the pocket into the seam of the center front panels. Then I stitched it into the seam of the vertical boning channel.

Boob pieces are stitched in along the boning channel seam (seen above). For this, I did a back stitch.

In the picture, you can also see where I marked my eyelets spacing.

The next step for this was the press again the seams for the panels, and then whipstitch the seams down. Examples of this are here and here, and is also seen in Part 3 of Rococo Atelier's stays tutorial.  This was also a pain, and the beginning of my hand-stitching nightmare. The one redeeming thing was as I did more, my stitching got faster and more uniform. Practice makes perfect, right?

When finished, they looked like this:

Seams are whip stitched and I'm starting to see stays!

*Please ignore the already made eyelets and tabs - I will talk about those in the next post.

Thanks for reading! Comments and constructive critiques are appreciated!

18th Century Stays - Part 2 - Beginning of Construction

Hi everyone!

In the first post for these stays, I detailed a bit on how exactly I made my pattern and constructed my mock-ups to check the fit. This post is going to be about the first stages of making the final product.

First thing I want to talk about is the materials I used, especially for the beginning of construction.

I am absolutely a thrift shopper - I go straight to the clearance section in Joann's or other craft stores, and I love going to thrift stores or church yard sales looking for fabric remnants. It's one of the best things ever.

For my interfacing, I used ~3yds of cotton buckram at Joann's that was on sale. It was nice and stiff but still very flexible, and it gave the stays the stability I wanted.

For my fashion fabric, I decided to use a grayish-blue cotton sateen king-sized top sheet I found at a thrift store for $3 (if you can find it, it was Sonoma-brand - I think they sell it at Kohls or JCPenny's).

This fabric is gorgeous - probably one of the prettiest blue colors I've seen (the camera doesn't do it justice) - and I after I cut the stays pieces, I still had a ton of it left, so I'm excited to use it in the future. I was inspired by a few pins of blue stays I found on Pinterest. Blue is also a nice color on me. :)

Some of the blue stays pins are here, here, and here.

Once I had all of my fabric together, I started cutting.

I started with cutting the buckram. I decided to use 2 layers of buckram in each panel, for stability purposes. I got this idea from Koshka-the--Cat's tutorial on 1780's stays. The buckram bolt I had was too long to really work with, so I actually cut it in thirds, and then pinned the thirds together to make two layers. Then I traced the pattern. I used the same method from the mock-up, where I traced the pattern and added a 1/2" seam allowance. In total, there were 16 pieces of buckram.

Lots of tracing.

Then, after all the panels were cut, I marked the boning channels by marking the ends of the lines to the edges of the panels and to the seam allowances

Then I used a needle to poke small holes through the paper in the places where the lines don't meet the edges of the panels. The needle was pretty wide - probably a tapestry or upholstery needle - so I could stick the pencil through.

Lines and dots everywhere...

In the above picture, you can see the little dots I marked on the stays panel for the boning channels. This took a lot, lot of time. The hardest part for me was making sure that not only were the holes in the pattern big enough to stick a fabric pencil through, but also that the fabric pencil was actually marking the buckram underneath. I also had to go back and make sure all of the boning channels were still, in fact, 5/16" wide.

After the boning channels were finished, I cut out the fashion fabric (the blue cotton) pieces, and then pinned those pieces - wrong sides together - to the corresponding buckram. The cotton sateen had a side that was more silky and shimmery, and that was the side I wanted to see, so I made that the right side* of the fabric. When I cut the center front and back panels from the fashion fabric, I added around 1.5 inches to the edges where the eyelets would be. This extra fabric would cover the raw edges of the middle layer, and add a little extra fabric to the lacing portion of the panel. Rococo Atelier mentions in her post that this 'will also make sure your lining won't show from underneath'.

Then I started stitching!

I used Cotton Quilting Thread with a natural color (more or less off-white) from Coats and Clark to stitch the channels - I wanted to have the boning channels visible and in a contrasting color. I originally wanted a yellow or gold color, but I went instead with the more natural, and probably more common, color. I stitched all of the channels plus the edges of some of the tabs, specifically the ones that had openings in the tops of the panels - this helped me to seal the channels for the future. It also kept the fabric for the tabs from flapping around and irritating me.

I start with the long channels, from the top to bottom, and then sew the smaller channels that intersected.

I was pretty fortunate that the pieces were relatively symmetrical once cut - no real overhang of extra fabric.

I did machine-stitch the boning channels. I know some people will point out "That's not historically accurate". And you're absolutely right - it's not, and I will be the first to admit that. But I absolutely HATE hand stitching, and I was not going to trust my hand-stitching skills to stitching something that needs to be sturdy and stay together when you tug the ever-living s**t out of it. Besides, the hand stitching comes later, and I needed to reserve all my loathing for that bit.

Rococo Atelier has a blog post about stitching together the boning channels and the stays, and includes her own Pinterest boards of different colored stays. I used her tutorial for the majority of my construction.

When I stitched the center front and center back channels, I did not stitch the boning channels right next to center front and center back, seen below:

The last boning channel is not stitched.

Once all the channels were stitched, I took the flap of fabric on the center front and back panels and pinned it onto the buckram. I then re-drew the outermost boning channels on the blue fabric.

Fabric is pined down to prevent sliding when machine stitching.

After doing this, I snipped off the excess at the bottom...

...and then I stitched the outermost boning channels.

I then tacked the fabric down along the edge of the second boning channel (the stitched channel closest to the edge). I will go back and baste this later.

Once all the panels were finished, I stitched the panels together using my machine. I pinned the seams of each panel together and stitched it with a running stitch, with two rows of stitches (because I'm paranoid). For the thread, I went with Coats and Clark Button and Craft thread - it's thicker and sturdier than the quilting thread.

When stitching the center front panels to the middle front panels, I stitched the first side without basting or tacking down the curved edge of the panel (seen below). And it was a b***h to get through the machine, especially along the lines I needed it to go. This was a learning moment for me. So when I got to the other side, I actually basted the curved edges to the middle front panels with the button thread, so it was easier to put through my machine. And it was MUCH easier.

Yay basting!

After stitching all the panels together, I iron-pressed the seam allowances flat, in order to whipstitch them down in the future. And voila! They were starting to look like stays!

All the panels sewn together.

The next post will continue the stays-making adventure, and I'll get into inserting the boning!

Thanks for reading! Comments and constructive critiques are appreciated!