Gores with a Wrapped Aprondress--Another View

Quite a while ago, I attempted to combine a wraparound Viking apron dress with gores, to give more room and a nice flare to the skirt.  My result was awkward looking, and based on how it came out, I decided that it was implausible, at best, that Viking women would have added gores to a wrapped dress.

Recently, however, I found a picture of a garment based on the same idea on the blog A Most Peculiar Mademoiselle, now revamped and renamed A Most Peculiar Seamstress.  You can see a picture of Sarah's dress here, although the accompanying post doesn't really discuss its construction; it mostly talks about what she did with the wrapped apron dress after it was vandalized by carpet beetles.

Sarah's dress does not look at all like mine; it is sleek and its hemline is beautifully even.  Of course, my wraparound dress was made from linen.  Sarah's dress was made from wool (which is why the carpet beetles were eager to eat it).  That would have made a considerable difference to the way the dress hung and draped.  I shall have to write to her and see if she can tell me more about her design.

At any rate, Sarah's successful design contradicts my original conclusion and leaves open the possibility that gored, wrapped apron dresses were worn by some Viking women.

HSM #9--The Lined, Wrapped Apron Dress Complete

Bottom corner, from the inside

Front view

Although it has taken me an additional month just to get the silk strip and loops sewn onto to the top of my lined, wrapped apron dress, the dress is finally complete. Here it is!  I have included close-ups of the corners and of the top edge both from the right side and wrong side, despite my less than stellar hand work, for those of my readers who want a better idea of exactly how it was made.  (I hope to replace the shots of me wearing the dress with clearer ones shortly.)

I realized, in the end, that I do not have enough information about the Grave 464 find that inspired this project to know exactly how the lining might have been secured, or even whether the entire dress was lined (though I think this was likely, if the dress truly was a wrapped-sheet type of dress). So I proceeded in a manner that would solidly fasten the wool and linen together without leaving raw edges, and covered the raw edge of the wool at the top with a pieced strip of my silk. The result gives the general idea of what a lined wrapped apron dress would be like in wear, but hardly qualifies even as an attempt to make a dress that is consistent with the fragments in Birka Grave 464.  

So here is how I made the dress.  

Small loop, from the inside

First, I laid the linen on top of the wool, wrong sides together, matching the fabric edge to edge as best I could. That meant matching the selvages on one side, and cutting a strip off of the other side, partly to attempt to (roughly) even out the differences in the fabric size, and partly to obtain a strip of fabric from which to make the loops.  Wool apron dresses with linen loops are common at Birka, but I had less of the linen than I did of the wool, so I didn't wish to cut the linen.  (If I had been concerned about cutting my piece of wool, I would have used scraps of linen from my stash for the loops; fortunately, my wool piece was large enough that I could spare a bit of it for the loops.  I like having matching wool loops better, and at least one period apron dress find has matching wool loops.)  The top was chosen so that the longer side would wrap around me; in other words, the fabric was aligned so that the dress would be about 36 inches long from top to bottom.

Next, I folded the top corner diagonally on the top and side to square it off (see picture), double folded the wool over the linen to enclose any raw edge, and stitched the two together using a whipstitch.  I continued this process along the bottom and other side, folding the corners but not cutting them (see pictures) as is common with modern mitering technique.

Finally, I cut two pieces of my silk, each about 3 1/2 inches wide and stitched them together end-to-end to make a strip long enough to cover the entire top edge of the dress. I folded all four sides of the strip to hide the raw edges.

And that is where I ran into a problem.

Because the linen and wool pieces aren't quite the same size, I had to figure out how to stitch the silk onto the top of the dress without (1) allowing any of the raw edge of the linen to show, and; (2) without having the line of the silk across the front of the dress look crooked or uneven.

What I ended up doing was a three-step process. First, I whip stitched the folded edge of the silk onto the linen lining, about 1 cm beneath the top edge of the linen.  Then I whip stitched the top edge of the linen to the wool, as close to the top edge of the wool as possible.  Finally, I folded the rest of the silk strip forward, over the top edge of the wool (with the raw edge of the silk tucked underneath) and stitched the silk onto the front of the dress, adjusting the visible width of the strip as necessary.

Left side view

Right side view

The most obvious difference between this dress and my wrapped, unlined, linen apron dresses, is that this dress is noticeably heavier than the other apron dresses I've made, except maybe for the Hedeby-style dress I made from heavy cotton denim. It's surprisingly warm and it hangs well--even better than my pure linen apron dresses.  Moreover, the way the dress wraps across the front conceals the fact that the line of the silk trim is (still, despite adjusting) uneven.  The unevenness in the hem caused by the fact that this is a wrapped garment shows, very slightly, at the bottom center, but is less conspicuous than the unevenness of hem that shows when I wear the wrapped linen apron dresses I have made.

Overall, I'm happy with the way the dress came out. Though I don't have enough information to guess how close I might have come to the way such a garment could have been made during the Viking period, let alone how the garment in Birka Grave 464 really was made, the project shows that a lined apron dress would have been wearable and comfortable.  As to whether one considers it attractive, it's not particularly sexy to modern eyes, but it has a clean dignity to it that is reminiscent at least some of the images of women in Viking period art.

HSM Challenge #9--Color Challenge Brown

Fabric:  A yard of very dark brown mid-weight wool, about 58 inches wide; a yard of cream-colored mid-weight linen, about 57 inches wide; and strips cut from a quarter-yard of silk taffeta.  The silk I had previously bought for another project, but the wool and linen were newly acquired.  

Pattern:  None needed.  The dress is based upon Agnes Geijer's theory that at least some apron dresses may have just consisted of a flat piece of fabric with loops sewn to the top edge that is wrapped around the body and fastened with pins.  (Perhaps older women wore wrapped apron dresses while younger women wore more fitted ones resembling reenactors' dresses based upon the Hedeby find?)  To the extent my limited information about the fragments found in Grave 464 at Birka, I tried to make the finished garment consistent with that information.    

Year:  The Viking age.  I think Grave 464 is one of the earlier Birka finds (9th century C.E.) though I'm not certain of that, and I don't know the extent to which anyone has attempted to date the finds in that particular grave.

Notions:   Dark brown, 100% silk Gutermann thread for stitching the wool and linen together along the sides, and some dark red 100% silk Gutermann thread for stitching the silk band in place.   Both were from my stash.

How historically accurate is it?   Not as accurate as I'd like it to be.  I don't really know whether the silk was folded at its outside edges where it attaches to the wool.  I suspect, though, that the silk actually found in Grave 464 was heavier and less prone to raveling than mine, and thus would not have required the foldovers on the edges of the silk that I needed to make on my silk.  Also, my wool and linen fabric pieces were slightly different in size and I didn't want to cut into the wool (which was the larger of the two) very much because I wanted to make sure there would be enough width that the dress would wrap around me comfortably.  As a result, in some places the linen and wool do not meet at the top, so the silk strip covers both but doesn't enclose them at the fold the way the original apparently did.  Because of this, I had to stitch the wool and linen together *before* folding the silk over both, and I know of no evidence that that was done on the original.   In addition, I don't know whether the corners of the dress were mitered in the modern fashion or only folded over to square them up, and I used silk thread, while the original was probably sewn with linen or wool.   So I don't rate the historical accuracy higher than about 50%, at best.

Hours to complete:  I didn't keep track very closely, but I think about 6-7 hours, spread over several non-consecutive days.

First worn:  To determine the correct placement for the loops.  When making an apron dress, I typically pin all the loops to the top of the dress with safety pins and try the dress on to determine whether the placement is appropriate before stitching them in place, and that's what I did here as well. The first real wearing was for the photographs accompanying this post.

Total cost:  About $45.00 USD (not counting the cost of the spandex-containing linen I'd bought to use for the project originally and had to replace).

EDIT (12/2/2015):  I forgot to mention that I did not spread the fabric out on a table to do the matching or any of the sewing.  I merely held the linen and wool in front of me, matched edges as best I could, and folded and stitched from there, so it *is* possible to do that.  (I did spread the partly-finished garment briefly on a bed to figure out how and where to place the silk strip, though).

Fitted Wrap-Around Apron Dress--An Update

Sugar, my cat, on top of a costume project

Remember my plan to make a fitted, wrap-around apron dress with a flared skirt to demonstrate that such a dress need not be a pieced tube like the Hedeby dress?

A few days ago, I picked this project back up and resumed the first task necessary to complete the dress, namely, hemming the open edges. Now that I'm nearly done with that, I'm ripping fabric in preparation for sewing straps, which I will pin in place to find the best locations. After that, I will sew in the skirt gores, hem the bottom, and maybe put some trim on the section of the wrap that will be the top layer between the brooches when the dress is wrapped on me, and it will be done!

You may be wondering why I jumped to working on the straps instead of finishing hemming the sides. The answer is that, before I went to rip the straps, I foolishly laid the folded dress-in-progress down on my futon--and my cat is now sound asleep on top of it. (The blue part is the apron dress-in-progress; the pink part is just one of my bathrobes.) Meet Sugar, my fabric tester and confidante. Yes, I'm another one of those costumers with a feline assistant. :-)

Anyway, it looks like I'm not going to get much farther than the straps tonight, which may be just as well since I'm still recovering from a bad cold. Hopefully, I'll be able to do more sewing, and more blogging, this weekend.

EDIT: You can click the picture to get a larger version. Part of her belly was recently shaved and the fur is just growing back in--Sugar is an elderly (but spry!) cat and recently had an ultrasound done to check the progress of a large benign cyst on her liver. (Prognosis: little growth in cyst, unlikely to cause problems).

The Fitted Wrapped Apron Dress--Thoughts So Far

Last weekend, I finally began work on the "fitted" wrapped apron dress  that I've been planning to make for months. 

What I have done so far was to take my fabric, decide on the approximate length and cut the fabric to length and width.  Then, I wrapped the piece around myself in the manner in which the finished dress will be worn, and marked locations at each hip that will be slit from hip to hem for the insertion of long gores.

I'm not completely sure how to decide upon the size of each gore.  They need to be wide enough so that the top portion will wrap snugly without causing the lower part to twist, or fail to cover my lower body.

The diagram below shows the plan of  the rest of the construction.  (Bear in mind that this sketch is only roughly to scale and the location of all features such as tucks is approximate.)  The dashed lines  on the main body part represent cuts, while the dotted lines show proposed tucks.  Thus far, I have trimmed my fabric to the main rectangular piece shown below, and cut slits where the dashed lines are.  The numbers show the order in which each  subsequent construction step is to be taken, to wit:

1. Hem the side edges.  (The top edge is a selvedge, so it's not going to be hemmed, this time around.)
2. Cut and insert a large triangular gore into each of the long slits.  The parallelogram shown below the body piece in my sketch is meant to represent two gores, cut on the diagonal line running roughly from right to left.
3. Make and attach the loops.  Like my orange wrapped apron dress, this dress will have three pairs of loops, two short sets (both of which will be in the front when the dress is worn) and one long set.
4. Try on the dress again, and add tucks above the waist to make the top fit more snugly.
5. Hem the bottom, evening out the length as necessary.
6. Trim as desired.  I'll probably just sew a piece of fabric or trim between the places where the brooches will sit, in the area shown on the diagram. 

Is there historic support for this design?  No.  Moreover, I doubt that this design would have been used in period, because while the body of the garment doesn't require wasteful cutting, the more-or-less freehand cutting of the gores I'm planning would be wasteful of fabric.

On the other hand, the top portion of the dress isn't blatantly inconsistent with the archaeological evidence, and it's possible that a similar effect could have been achieved non-wastefully in period by piecing many small scraps of fabric into two large gores.  Garments such as the Viborg shirt show that the Vikings had no problem with piecing many small bits of fabric to achieve the effects they were after. 

At this point, I'm mostly interested in demonstrating that it would be physically possible to craft a body-fitting garment that would not need to be wriggled into and that would have the convenient access to the breasts of the wrapped dress designs. 

I will, of course, post pictures when the dress is completed.  Hopefully, I can make some progress this weekend.

The Fitted Wrap Apron Dress--Construction Method

I am still binding the edge of my mantion, so there is nothing interesting to report on that project. For that reason, I have been seriously thinking about starting work on my fitted wrap-style apron dress, which should go much more quickly and be more interesting to write about. :-)

My planned construction method is simple (though of course that's no guarantee that it will work out the way I want it to). Here it is:

1) Figure out how long a piece of fabric I need to wrap around my body approximately one and one-half times (i.e., starting the edge near my right armpit, wrapping the fabric across my body to my left side, around my back, and across my front again, cutting off the excess fabric an inch or two past my left armpit). I intend to do the "wrapping" over the shift and tunic I'd like to wear with the dress, because I intend to wear the dress wrapped as tightly as possible.

2) Figure out how long I want the dress to be, and cut any excess off at the bottom. I usually like my apron dresses to be calf length (there's no archaeological evidence for the length of any apron dress, but that length looks good on me).

3) Measure the distance from the top of my hip to the bottom edge of the "dress". Let's call that length "A".

4) Figure out (if only by eyeball and guess) how wide the bottom of an isosceles-triangle shaped gore would need to be to give me adequate fullness at the hip level. Call that length "B".

5) Figure out where to splice three such gores into the long piece of fabric I've reserved for the dress. The idea would be to slit the fabric from the bottom edge up far enough to sew in a triangular gore with altitude equal in length to "A" and with the bottom of the triangle equal in length to "B". My current idea is to slit the fabric where it crosses each hipbone and place one full gore in each slit. Then, I would cut the third gore in half down the middle, creating two right triangles, and sew the long side (i.e., the side opposite the hypotenuse) of each half-gore to each edge of the dress.

EDIT: I'm also thinking about inserting at least one more gore in the center of the back part of the wrap, for extra fullness.

6) Re-wrap the dress to check for fit, and to ascertain where to put the loops. (The loop placement would probably be within an inch or two of the loop placement on my orange wrap around apron dress.)

7) Sew on the straps, hem the edges as necessary, and consider taking a few tucks where the fabric passes my waist.

8) I haven't decided whether I will decorate this dress, but if I do that will come last of all. Probably I will just apply a strip of trim on the topmost part of the wrap, between the places where the brooches will sit.

I don't pretend that this idea can be substantiated as having been used in period, or even to confirm that it is a plausible period design (though it shouldn't be terribly wasteful of fabric if I position the gores right). My purpose here is to see whether I can make a wraparound apron dress that doesn't look like a sack on my pear-shaped figure. Why not? I have nothing to lose other than the cost of the fabric and however much time it takes for me to do the necessary handsewing.

Fitted Wrap-Around Apron Dress--More Planning

Since I have only two active projects, naturally it seemed like a good time to buy fabric for the fitted wrap-around apron dress I want to make. :-) I took advantage of a sale to get two and-one-half yards of this blue linen from fabrics-store.com.

I also took another look at the fitted wrap apron dress pattern pearl pointed out to me. That pattern really isn't what I want--in wear, it looks too much like the non-gored wrapped apron dresses I already have. Sonya's suggestion (in the comments to my first entry on this type of dress) sounds much closer to what I want--a garment that is snugly wrapped on top, but has fullness added in at the bottom by placing gores at the waist/hip level. I think I will experiment along those lines, once my fabric shows up.

Viking Apron Dresses--Wrap Around Styles

My next experiments in apron dress design were with "wrap around styles" that consist of a flat sheet of fabric with three sets of loops attached. With these styles, there are three loops on each brooch pin; some actual finds show three loops.

The dress on the left, in orange, has two short sets of loops and one long set. The dress wraps around the body from back to front, with the long loops coming over the shoulders and the short loops in front; the open end is in front, near the side of the body.

The dress on the right, in green, has the opposite arrangement; it has two pair of long loops and one short pair of loops, and wraps from front to back, with the opening on the side in the back.

Both of these dresses are made of linen, and are completely hand sewn, though they use commercial trim.