This past week's reflection!

 It’s now the end of my first week of sewing an 1890s evening gown, and I’ve been challenged in many different ways! I started off the first day by printing out all of my patterns, it took much longer than I had expected(almost an hour!) and used much more paper than I thought it would. After that, I had to cut each piece of paper to the correct size before even being able to tape them all together. I had expected to face many hardships during my project, but I didn’t think that the most difficult part of my project so far would be cutting up paper for hours on end. I was in an area in the basement of the theater where I couldn’t see any windows and the lighting was quite dark, so sitting in the dark with no outside light was extremely difficult for me. I almost didn’t complete this part of the project and I actually had to pull up a youtube video of birds outside and blast my music so loud my ears rang to distract me from how depressing it was to sit in the dark and do the worst repetitive task on the planet for hours on end. It’s incredibly important to assemble my patterns before I start on any piece of the gown and its undergarments, and it was actually a part of one of my goals: To design and prepare to sew the dress- but its tediousness made it beyond difficult to do efficiently. I was able to cut all of the undergarment patterns in the end and was able to sew the chemise, the petticoat, and the corset. I’ve enjoyed sewing the petticoat the most so far, even though creating the ruffles for it was competing with cutting patterns for the most boring and/or frustrating part of the project. I had sewn dress-like things before so the chemise wasn’t too difficult, and I’ve made a couple of corsets before too, so making the petticoat was a great new experience. I had never gathered fabric before so I got to teach myself how to gather and then sew the gathers onto the petticoat, and I enjoyed making pleats for the waistband because even though I knew how to make pleats in theory I had never actually done them. Another frustrating part of this project so far is the corset. I’ve made about three corsets in the past so I thought that making the corset for this project would be a simple and quick way to finish out my week. I didn’t think about the fact that I had never actually made this specific type of corset, only making corsets from the 1700s instead of the 1800s, and there was a drastic shift in corset types between that time period. So building the corset actually took much longer than anticipated and it’s still not finished, so I’ll have to finish it on Monday. One of my goals was to research the sociopolitical impact that 1890s fashion had on the world. I’ve been reading an incredibly interesting book about the economic impact that American women had on the French fashion industry in the 1800s, so I’ve veered slightly away from the sociopolitical of it, but I think that what I am learning is actually more interesting than that. The book is called Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block and it has completely hooked me. Apparently, the French fashion industry had completely taken over France and the primary employer of French workers was the garment trade! Also, department stores were coming into popularity during this time and they made the export and import of French textiles more common! I find fashion and textile history extremely fascinating and that’s why I chose to do this project, and so far even though there have been many(many) challenges, I’m glad to be doing it!

Overall Hours This Week: 45.5