elizabeth_mn

Finished!

I’m wearing this over my horsehair bustle .

I drafted this pattern from scratch and now I kind of wish I hadn’t. I like the finished product, but getting to here was a bit more tedious than I would have liked.

There are 7 pieces to the petticoat base: Front, two side fronts, two sides, and two backs. The backs are straight rectangles; the other pieces are gored. They are very narrow in keeping with the Natural Form look. The back is not very full, but what fullness there is gathers into the yoke. The bottom ruffle is intentionally gathered fuller in back than front.

I could have made the back ruffles fuller, but I was trying to contain myself. It is Natural Form, after all. It’s funny, when I first started costuming, I could never get my skirts to look full enough, but now it takes effort to make the silhouette narrower.

I gathered the lace edging slightly using the pull string already in the lace and sewed it to the ruffles with a machine blanket stitch, keeping the straight portion of the stitch on the fabric and letting the ‘arm’ part grab the lace. I thought it would look nicer to avoid a hard line of topstitching over the lace.

The yoke is darted in front and the top edge is bound with a self-fabric strip, forming a tiny waistband and serving as a casing for the partial drawstring in back.

The CB split could have been a bit deeper, because getting the petticoat on and off is a little tight. But I ran into the ruffles, so it's as good as I could get. Call it a design flaw. Maybe next time I will put buttons along a side seam, like in some period drawings.