1848 Jacket Sewalong: The braiding pattern

I keep forgetting to post this.

Here's a link to the braiding pattern - the soutache, and the "frog closures". It's one page in PDF that should give you a braiding pattern to fit into a 4 cm border at 100%.

The soutache pattern, I admit, is slightly different from what's on the jacket, where it's more... rounded. This is what I worked out in Inkscape, while trying to fit it into the 4 cm border with a 3 mm wide line - to accommodate my soutache. I guess the original braid was narrower. (The line in the final pattern is narrower, too, but I had to try it out with the 3 mm, to make sure it does not overlap or anything.)
It's the front centre corner of the jacket (turned 90 degrees). In the rest of the jacket, the pattern just continues. I haven't tried deciphering the sleeve pattern from the photos; that would take forever and I don't want to duplicate it anyway.


The closure is so complicated, the resizing from the tiny picture in the book - especially because it's imprecise there - took me some time... I still haven't really figured that pattern out. Maybe I'll cowardly back out from that to something less complicated...

1848 Jacket Sewalong: Construction tips and ideas

The introductory post on the history of the garment and my plans
The post with the pattern

What happened to the sewalong, you wonder? I promised in a comment I would put this up on Friday or Saturday. I didn't. I got caught up in sewing the cording in my Regency stays. It takes a lot of time, particularly with handsewing, but thankfully, I quite enjoy the process, maybe precisely because of the slow handsewing. Anyway, immersed in that, I kind of kept forgetting about this.

And because of all that, I'm also going to be honest up front and share the decision I've made: to skimp a bit on historical accuracy with the kacabajka and sew the bulk of seams on the machine. If I want to finish it this year and not four years later, I've got to. I'm making it primarily for fun and style, not any kind of reenactment, so it's not such a problem for me, just for the unrealistic historical geek in me. The construction method will still hopefully be basically historical, and all the finishing handsewn.

* * *

Here's a different photo of the kacabajka, from Národní oděv roku 1848 by Mirjam Moravcová - it's the same frontal view, but it offers a better view of the sleeve braiding (if you're ambitious enough for that; I'm not) and also of the inside of the sleeve. That inside makes me wonder, but more on that later...

* * *

So, what is the construction method? My preliminary research (read: asking people who know better) tells me the jacket would be flatlined. Flatlining is a method that sounds very fancy and isn't really fancy at all. It is, actually, a very simple matter of cutting the lining exactly the same as the outer fabric and then treating them as one (so you could also see a similar method referred to as interlining or underlining these days).

• Here's an exhaustive yet simple explanation and tutorial from The Dreamstress - including how to treat darts, which applies to our pattern.

An Easter gift for you: Free pattern for a 1848 jacket aka kacabajka, and sewalong

So, the 1848 kacabajka. The one I have a pattern for.

Want that pattern? You can have it. You can have it for free, as a multisize printable PDF.

There are, of course, catches, because I'm by no means a pattern-making expert. But it's free! Well, free provided you don't count additional work as cost. Practically free! You can make yourself a mid-19th century jacket, or one in the style, and you don't have to pay for the pattern, or painstakingly resize it from a tiny draft. That's good, right?

Politics of fashion: A broad summary on the Czech national costume of 1848

Another of the Historical Sew Fortnightly challenges is now up with details - the Politics of Fashion. Now this is one challenge that definitely suits my sewing plans wonderfully. I love it when the challenges match things I wanted to make anyway. There's no other point in it for me, given how slowly I make things.

I'm going to - hopefully - deal with yet another way politics influenced fashion: I'm making one of those "national costumes" that were developed during the nationalistic emancipation that happened in Europe during the 19th century.
I've just made up the term "nationalistic emancipation", although it's quite possible someone's done it before. I mean that process of arising national consciousness in late 18th and especially during 19th century that eventually often resulted in new countries in Europe, some actually historical like mine is, others really pretty much new, or new amalgamations of historical states (hello, Italy and Germany!). It was a very political phenomenon indeed, connected to the various attempts at constitutional monarchy or more. Very often, it also led to ugly things, like nationalistic pride and conflicts and stuff like the affair of the ostensibly historical manuscripts (Rukopis královédvorský a zelenohorský) that were to prove the Czechs' famous history but were apparently falsified. People were so proud of them that those who dared to point out the inconsistencies were dubbed enemies of the nation (T. G. Masaryk, famously).
But it also involved language study - in many cases language saving - and recording of folklore, and increasingly successful attempts at literature and translations and similar stuff that is actually still going on around the world nowadays. (Like, hey, Apache Mescalero dictionary! Navajo Star Wars!) So even though it often seems like dusty past (especially if you have to learn about it for school and everyone's either treating it like something sacred, or scorning it, with no middle ground), it actually still carries a lot of significance nowadays. And without it, things like Karel Čapek's amazing writing or Stanislava Pošustová's excellent translation of The Lord of the Rings could not have happened. Just to point out some reasons why I personally am glad it happened. :-)
(Although, in this particular case, the costume does not have so much significance nowadays...)

I know some nations already more or less had their national costume / style of clothing - I think Poland was one (old portraits of Polish nobles definitely have their own style). Others had to develop their own - e.g. Germans were trying, too (I'm not sure what the results of that were - dirndl?). Yet others, obviously those nations that were well established already, did not bother. (Hello, Britain.)

Prague fashions of 1848. Note the red and white. Source (3)

Czechs bothered. And ended up with something that was actually pretty similar to, for example, Hungarian clothes (if you look at e.g. depictions of Lajos Kossuth, it's really similar). There were various reasons for that, one of them being precisely the concern of fashion that this HSF challenge is connected to. I believe, in the end, the most national part of it were the usual colours - they tended to go with blue and white, the accepted Slavic combination (which I so dearly love, too :D), or red and white, the combination found on the 19th century Czech flag. Or all of it, just as it combines on the current Czech flag.
 
You know how I was dreaming about the 1848 kacabajka? Talking about it with nothing happening, as is pretty much the norm on this blog by now?

The "Slavic kacabajka" of Ludmila Tomková from the collections of the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum in Prague. Source (1)

Ideas

I went to the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum in Brno on Friday. The entrance was free this weekend (lucky me!). I forgot to ask about their photography policy. I hope it's possible to take photos there, for when I go there next, because they have one of the loveliest 1840s dresses I've ever seen. Well, the only one I've ever seen in real life and not just on a picture, which makes for a lovely dress in and of itself. :-)

I got inspired and drew a sketch of my idea for the kacabajka and the OUATITW blouse. It's kind of my re-imagination of the 1848 Czech national costume... not entirely period correct, but in the same spirit. A 21st century Czech national costume, so to say.

It's just a quick and rather messy sketch I made on a train, but for such, not bad at all. :D


EDIT: I added the Research tag, for my comments below.

Progress for my medieval dress!

Once upon a time, I started mocking up a medieval dress (called cotehardie, cotte, something like that) from old bedsheets on myself. Draping it on myself. With no previous experience in draping. I'm crazy like that.
After three or four or how many mock-ups, I managed to arrive at something quite usable. Or almost.

It works in the front. It did not work in the back.

And I left it like that for over a year. *phew*

Now, thanks to American Duchess' post on a 17th century jacket - with gussets - I realised that her problem might be my problem, too, and started playing with the back gusset. In the end I decided to drop the center back gusset altogether and go with side gussets just like in the front, because the center gusset creates strange kind of drape in there. But it all started with the Duchess' post, so - thank you very much, again!

Now I'm going to play with some sleeves options.

And after that is figured out, I'm going to make a wearable muslin out of that blue-grey fabric from my grandma (remember, I have heaps of it). The point of making a wearable muslin in this case lies in
a) figuring out how much fabric it actually eats up before I cut into my silk (and eventually making amends if it turns out it eats up too much), and
b) having a version of it finished even if I don't manage to finish the silk dress by the time of the local festival. Because I really do not want to wear my first, poor, Halloween-y attempt on a medieval dress again. (It was made for a party in the second-to-last grade of Grammar school, so technically it's not a Halloween costume - but I did wear it to a Halloween party, too.)

Oh, and then there's
c) having something for the Historical Costume Inspiration Festival. Because I think this is much more doable than the 1848 jacket AKA kacabajka. For one, our local notions shop does not carry soutache, so I'll have to obtain it somewhere else. For two, for the jacket I'd have to make completely new mock-ups, while this thing is already mock-upped. For three, this is an even older inspiration than the 1848 jacket:



It's Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry: Juin by the Limbourg brothers, and the image is taken from the Web Gallery of Art, but I first came across it in Kybalová's book on medieval clothing, which was the second of her books I've got (the first was ancient clothing). So that was long before I set my eyes on the 1848 jacket.
With my love for blue and white, I naturally fell in love with those dresses... They're work dresses, worn in the fields, but from all I know, they're the basic shape used for all classes, so I think it can work for a townsman's daughter as well (that's me, if you didn't realise). I plan on making the silk dress with detachable lower sleeves, so that I can wear it long-sleeved for the festival, and short-sleeved to church or somewhere else in real life. So yes, those short sleeves work for me, too.

I'm getting really excited about this. Especially about the fact I'm going to make something that works for me on so many levels... I'll use the mock-up dress as a workdress around the house, with the possibility to wear it to the festival if I do not manage to make the silk version in time. It's going to be my favourite shade of blue. It's going to have a fun, long, flowing skirt. And it's going to be a delightfully subversive dress in my own way, a medieval dress worn in 21st century.

(Oh, and remember the rust-coloured velvet? That's going to become another incarnation of this dress. So is, hopefully, the Marimekko print. Now that's going to be one fun, delightfully subversive dress, guaranteed!)

Kacabajka-related thoughts

That's what the nationalist 1848 Czech type of jacket was called. Kacabajka. Which, you English speaking folk, is definitely pronounced differently than you would pronounce it. But I'm not going to try to give you an idea, because my ability to transcribe Czech words in English equals that of English speaking folk to pronounce them.

I did find the passage about that particular jacket (which is in the collections of Umělecko-průmyslové muzeum in Prague). Yes, it was blue and white - light blue, with white borders, and the soutache trim was most probably navy/dark blue (it does look navy on the photo). So the fabric I have got from grandma is perfect in terms of colour.
It's not perfect otherwise, though, because the original jacket is made of silk, while my fabric is rather loosely and roughly woven... cotton, most probably.
Still, I think I'd give it a try. I like the colour and I have heaps of that fabric, so if it doesn't work out, it's not such a problem... I can always interline/flat-line it with something more densely woven to balance out its loose weave. Plus, it seems quite "period" in other aspects.
First, it's narrower than most contemporary fabrics - my guess is 1 m (roughly compared to our 90 cm wide dining table, because I was too lazy to measure it).
Second, a passage in the book says that some of the Czech nationalists of that era who promoted "national costume" also promoted the use of fabric from the mountainous regions of Bohemia, so called "plátno" - woven, and not woolen, as opposed to "sukno" which was, as far as I know, woollen, and which, as quoted in the book, some of the 1840s Czech nationalists equaled with Germans. Sometimes their logic really escapes me...
Anyway, I digress. As the book says, in order to support Czech weavers they promoted the use of Bohemian wovens from the mountainous regions, that were actually woven in satin weave - which my fabric is.



The colour is a bit off, but you can see the weave very well. And the fascinating way the weft and warp threads alternate so that the seemingly dominating direction of threads differs on each side of the fabric. If that makes sense described like this... I think, from satin-weaves, so far I've only encountered crepe-backed satin (AKA charmeuse) or damask (i.e. patterned weave), so this is new to me, and I love it.
I guess that "plátno" which they were promoting for national costume must have been very similar to this. Only most probably linen, not cotton.

The book says these jackets were worn with white skirts, which is an idea I really like. I imagine it worn with a long white skirt, and the OUATITW blouse underneath it... what a lovely mental image. Now I have to make at least one of those things. The OUATITW blouse is an obvious choice, seeing as I already have both the pattern and the fabric.

If I decipher the pattern draft correctly... if I do, to my great and pleasant surprise it seems the original wearer's bust and waist circumference was about the same as mine (at least the waist; I'm not so sure how to determine the bust measurement with the various pattern pieces).
In an ideal world, this would mean I could enlarge the pattern and use it without alterations. Alas, it is not so. Ms Ludmila Tomková of kacabajka renown was apparently very short torso-ed: 29 cm from nape of neck to waist. I, on the other hand, am slightly long-torsoed - about 41 cm, probably to balance out my undeniably short legs. So I'll have to lengthen it in the torso and, on the contrary, shorten it in the hips area, or my legs would look even shorter.

I'll conclude here with a photo of the pattern draft for your sewing-related dreams:



And here I'll leave you, waiting and drooling over its possibilities, until I finish at least some of my Regency-related and modern sewing, and that sontag from Stephanie Ann's Civil War Era Knit-Along.


(Also, this post seems to be an exercise in "How many labels can you squeeze into one post?")

The End. For now.


P.S. That was not long... I forgot to mention that, somehow, I managed to buy both a hat and sunglasses. The sunglasses are not of much consequence for this blog, the hat I'll get to later.

Look what I've got! - the books edition AKA Books are gonna be the death of me

(Paraphrasing the title of this blog post.)

Because one day, they're going to land on me while I'm sleeping, all tens if not hundreds of them. Because I'm running out of shelf space and store most of my new acquisitions on the second store of the storey bed I sleep in. (That's, by the way, a pun that probably only works in English. But it's completely true in my Czech reality.)

In other words, I ought to get rid of some of the old things I've been hoarding, to make room for the books.

In yet other words, it seems I'm not going to get a hat anytime soon. Today, I wanted to try to buy a hat. The shop I went to first was already closed. So I went to a secondhand bookshop next door, and came away with more books than I originally wanted to. And strolling around potentially hat-offering shops was not an option anymore.

But it was worth it. Because I got this:



Picts and Martyrs by Arthur Ransome. One of my favourites by him, and until now one of the few I didn't have yet. (The cover is quite awful, but inside are Ransome's own illustrations.)

And this:



Self-explanatory.

And a thick book that was the main reason why strolling around shops was not an option anymore, but I won't show you that, because it's a Top Secret Gift for my sister, and I can't be sure she isn't lurking around here. Besides, you wouldn't appreciate its greatness (or at least its assumed greatness) anyway.

But the best part are these two:



My Favourite Book Ever, give or take a few. The reason behind my love for Regency, too.
One of those books worthy of a pretty cover, for sure. It's unfortunately a paperback; but a very pretty paperback from the 50s. And yes, those were the dark times of communism in this part of the world, but it must have been a golden age for editions of Pan Tadeusz... the Czech edition in our local library is from the 50s, too.
Now I'll see whether my conviction that I understand written Polish is correct... Seeing as I've read the Czech translation many times, and seen the Polish film from 1999 many times, I don't think it should be a big problem.

Aaaand...



A monography on Czech "national costume" in 1848 (and some years beyond that)! Guess what it has to do with my reading of Božena Němcová's letters?
With pattern drafts! And not just any pattern drafts, with a pattern draft for the jacket I've loved in the series on historical fashions by Ludmila Kybalová! Most of the pattern drafts are for male costumes, in fact, but whatever, it has a pattern for that jacket which I've secretly wished to duplicate, hooorray!

And because I've wished so secretly, here it is:



I've wanted to make it in blue and white, and now that I've read a passage on this type of jackets in the book, I suspect the original might have started out as blue and white as well. (I didn't find the passage about this particular one yet, but it must be there somewhere. I'm sure to find it soon.) I even already have the perfect colour of fabric for it (another of my grandma's hoards), although I do not know if it is the correct type of fabric. From another passage in the book, I suspect it might be. *grin*
I'd probably make the embelishments simpler, because this screams "national Czech costume from 1848" (which is exactly what it is, after all), but I love the lines of it. A wonderful summer jacket, isn't it? Not this summer, but one of those to come for sure.