a day OFF: taking control of the 18th-c stuff

[dragonlady7]

I should tag things in this journal. Like, ever.
I have a kind of informal list I recently started in my head, of things that, should I be horribly injured in a freak accident or, say, doing roller derby, I will spend my recuperative time doing. We had a girl injured first season with an awful spiral tib-fib fracture in her lower leg, and she was stuck in bed for weeks, unable to bear any weight on her injured leg. And we all were horrified-- how ever would she keep from going mad with boredom?
Well, I have a list. At the risk of incurring bad fortune (heaven forfend), I venture to say that I could safely spend about six weeks in bed, horribly frustrated, but never short of things to do, not even for a moment.
Among those things would be migrating this journal over to DW and tagging it all, by subject.

Anyway. This would have an 18th C tag, if I had one, and a sewing tag. Yesterday I worked, my sixth day of the week, and then finished the extremely minor but annoying alterations to my plunge-front convertible bra and the strappy dress I bought. Of course it was 40 degrees out, so I had to wear a shapeless sweater and a huge scarf, but for the nanosecond it was warm enough, I looked fabulous at the wedding reception in my glittery dress. Which shed glitter all over the house. Argh.
But today, I did not leave the house. I did a truly epic quantity of laundry, and set to work. Z had to man the scoreboard at a roller derby scrimmage-- Long Island's team came up to play Rochester Saturday night, and made the most of their trip by scrimmaging our travel team this morning. Our travel team beat them by over 100 points but I haven't heard whether it was a good game or not-- sometimes games like that are fantastic anyway despite the score. I don't know.
So I took advantage of Z not being around, and banished myself to my Basement Lair to do some sewing.

I made what I'm calling a "skirt support", because I don't like the word "bumroll". I never cared, until I was making one, and there were the instructions. Bumroll bumroll bumroll. It sounds stupid. So I made one, insanely overcomplicated, expressly so that I could take my measurements with it on, so that I could make the first underpetticoat to go under the dress I still haven't decided on.
It's a very small, very lumpy skirt support, and I am going to have to revise it a bit. I might take it apart and redo, or I might just make it a nice covering to smooth out the lumpiness and the fact that I didn't clip the seams at all and am super-lazy. Or I might not worry; two petticoats and a skirt over it and it probably won't matter one bit. I should mention it is lumpy because I stuffed it with dryer lint and fabric scraps, because I am cheap and lazy, and did not trim seam allowances or clip curves or anything that one would do in order to do it right.

The petticoat, I made of very very cheap unbleached cotton muslin. Very cheap, very thin. So I did a corded hem, using the cording/zipper foot on my sewing machine. Two lengths of cord all along the hem-- a straight hem, as is period, not a curved one. I am now going to curve the waistband edge instead of the hem, ta-da, and pleat the crap out of it to a two-part waistband, and hand-bind and tack the pocket slits, and feel proud of myself. If I go do that now, I will be done with it tonight.
But I still have wine to drink. Mmm wine.

I am not 100% decided on the outer layer. No contouche/francaise; I won't be making pocket hoops, and don't want to be all High French Court Fashion when I'm pretty sure the bride will be going for the Homespun Colonial look. I may just make a, whatsit, one of those long-tailed jacket things, and a nice co-ordinating petticoat for underneath. I don't remember what they're called, but my mother had an outfit like that and I borrowed it as a young teenager on more than one occasion.

I'm pretty definitely 100% not going to make new stays. It kills me, but I'm just going to wear the farby brocade corset instead. I'll make the body of the upper garment, whatever I end up making, with nice big seam allowances in the idea that maybe someday I'll re-fit it over proper stays. But meanwhile, I'm just going to use what I have.

OK, off to make the waistband and do the pleating...

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I had a list too, but the trouble is that if one is confined to bed, you almost definitely can't do anything else. In other words -- it may be your leg that's broken, but the pain meds will be what's keeping you from getting anything done. And doing things while flat on your back is MUCH harder than it seems. Any injury from neck to back to leg will ensure you can't move ANY of those parts -- because the spine connects them all. So you are limited to shoulder movement, except raising your head may also be painful. Oh, and while it hurts to move, you must turn every so often because the part of your body you're laying on most begins to hurt terribly from simply laying on it. I turned every two hours and was on a waterbed and still it was agony.

You could probably do some sewing -- though it's doubtful that it will be done correctly. I was too out of my mind to write or even read (couldn't follow a sentence) for the first three weeks. I mainly stared at the television or talked to people on my phone. As I recall, any activity, such as speaking to someone for 15 min or trying to follow a 45-min tv episode, was so exhausting that I needed to sleep for four or five hours afterward.

I know this ruins your plan (which I hope you'll never need anyway). All I can say is, you probably could knit a lot.