Making an 18th Century Closed Front Française Gown from an Original Pattern- Part 1

Hello all and welcome. My name is Margaret. I'm a historical costumer, a textile conservator in training, and today I have a very exciting video. I am finally making my closed front robe a la francaise gown. I will link up in the cards and down below the video where I sort of introduced this project and also talk about the closed front francaise as a style, but today in this video we are going to construct the petticoat and the first half of the gown, and then in a couple weeks we will construct the rest of the gown, we'll trim the gown, and we'll make all the accessories. So let's just dive right into it. So the first part of constructing this outfit was of course the petticoat. This was made of a lightweight silk taffeta from Butterfly Silks. I will link it down below. My TikTok followers actually helped me pick out this color, so thank you to them. You can follow me there at Costumer Conservation, it's you, so choose. But essentially I cut three panels of this, they were 37 1⁄2 inches long, which ended up being too short, you'll see that in just a little bit. But essentially I had one full panel in the front, one full panel in the back, and then I cut one of the panels in half so that I would have sort of an even place to put my pocket slits with more volume in the back. I then seamed these together by hand using the mantua maker seam. I was sort of using the American Duchess's Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking book for this petticoat. I used some of their instructions and then also just made half of it up, which is typical of my sewing. I am hand sewing this entire project, mostly because I like hand sewing, also because it's historically accurate, but I really do just like sitting on my couch and watching TV and doing my hand sewing, which is why you will see me sitting on my couch doing that exact thing through both of these videos. I then left 10 or so inches open in the panels to make the pocket slits, and then finished those off with just a nice hemming stitch. And then hemmed the overall petticoat with a very tiny sort of double folded hem. And then popped the petticoat on my mannequin over my stays and the bum pad that I'm using for this. This type of francaise was often worn over a bum pad because it is a little bit later in the timeline when talking about francaises. And I pleated the petticoat over my mannequin by eye. Now this is a lot easier to do when you have someone else fitting it on you, but this is a very close second for ways of doing this. I will say my petticoat was too short in the back. You can tell by the running theme of things just being too short, but that didn't bother me so much because it wasn't too too bad, and also, you know, there's only so much you can do when you are fitting it on a mannequin and not on yourself. So this is what we have so far, just in my undergarments. I've got my shoes and my petticoat, which I'm really liking the color and the volume of this. The one thing is my bum roll, I'm going to take the chunk out of the front because, like, I don't think this is, like, super flattering, so I'm going to chop it off to here so that I can have a flat front area because all the portraits I look at have that. But I've got quite a bit of volume in the back, and then definitely sort of an ankle-length petticoat going on here. It might be a little short, but petticoats were shorter during this time, so I think it'll be fine. I can add a ruffle to it if I need, and frankly, I can always make a new petticoat too because they don't take too, too long to make. So yeah, that's where we're at. The next step, of course, was to attach the waistband on both the front and back. I just used a running backstitch over the already basted pleats to sort of secure it in place, and then whipstitched the other side of the waistband to keep that in place as well. And then I added twill tape ties for the closure. Now at this point, I determined that the length was bothering me, so I seamed together some seven-inch strips of fabric, I hemmed these, and then box pleated them. Okay, so update on the petticoat. It's done, but it's too short. Too damn short. I always do this. I always make my skirts too short. This one was because I had just, like, just enough fabric. If I made it 37 and a half inches, it needed to be more like 39 inches, because it's, like, in that range where it's almost long enough, but not quite long enough, which means one thing and one thing only, ruffle. So I got to spend, get to spend however many hours hand-hemming both sides of this panel of fabric to attach it to the bottom of my skirt. So that's what we're going to do next. It's going to be great. This always happens to me. I should really learn my lesson, but I'm not going to. Then I spent a few true crime documentaries to finish up that ruffle and pin it and stitch it on to the petticoat, and with that, the petticoat was done, and it was time to move on to the sack. Okay, so this is the plan for cutting out the back. I'm doing the back right now because I just don't want to do fittings on the front, so I'm going to seam all these pieces together and then do the hem while it's flat, and then put the sack onto the back, mostly constructed. So as you can see, we have two on either side that are going to be 44 1⁄2. The second two are going to be 58 1⁄4, and then the long pieces are going to be 62 inches. And then I'm also doing the width at 21.5 inches wide because that's how wide the original panels of this original sack were. So I am going to cut the fabric in half, and then I'm going to have a little extra left over for the roving, so that's the plan. So the sack itself is a replica of one that I worked with over the summer. Hopefully in the next part, I will be able to show you more of the pattern of that specific sack, but because I was using this garment, sort of replicating it, I was using the original pattern of this garment, which means it has some weird quirks to it, and that's why I ended up cutting my fabric in half to make those 21 1⁄2 inch wide panels to really mirror what was happening with the original sack. So I cut the taffeta, this is from Silk Baron, to the measurements that I mentioned in the previous clip, and I seamed them all together with silk thread and Mantua Maker Seams, and this took forever. And the Mantua Maker Seams are kind of bulky, because this fabric from Silk Baron is, you know, a nice solid weight. The original fabric was this beautiful silk brocade, of course way out of my price range now, and because it was only 21 1⁄2 inch wide, they just running stitched it together, selvedge to selvedge, so they didn't have the bulky seams, but also it's gonna be fine. We're gonna be fine! Halfway through this process of doing these Mantua Maker Seams, I realized that in order to understand where I was going to place panels 1 and 6, the outermost panels, I was going to have to figure out exactly where on panels 5 and 2, I was going to cut in the back to create the difference between the skirt and the actual back, and I wanted to make sure it was exactly the length that I thought it was going to be, because I thought it was going to be around 10 ¾ of an inch, but I wanted to make sure, because I did have to do some alterations to this pattern to make it my size, so at this point I started to construct the bodice. I cut the front, the shoulder, and the back, lining out of this beautiful plain linen. This is actually a bed sheet that I found at the thrift store, it's a 100% linen bed sheet. It was a great find. I know, I washed it up and did all that stuff. And then I also cut the front and the shoulder straps out of the silk baron silk as well. I seamed all of the lining pieces together so I could do a fitting just to make sure that everything was perfect, and I just used lap seams with running stitches and linen thread, because that's what was done on the original. At this point I also finished the edge of the lacing strips on the back. This is a lacing panel on the back lining, so it's somewhat adjustable, and then I worked the eyelets in linen thread, hand-worked those, didn't get any footage of it though. Then I did a fitting with this lining, I did do some minor alterations, just kind of bringing the straps in a little bit more, because on my mock-up, the fabric stretched in different ways, so just quick nipped that up really quick, and then I was ready to put the silk fabric, fashion fabric on. So I just turned in the seam allowance on both the silk and the linen, put those together, and then sewed them together with the running stitches. I put a line of running stitches about a half inch away from the center front edge to reinforce where the hooks and eyes were going to go, and this was also done on the original, and then I put the hooks and eyes on. I didn't quite have enough hooks and eyes. I might go back and add more to the arms with you, because they're a little bit too spaced out, but also the rovings might hide it, so it'll be fine. And then I secured the shoulder strap in place as well. And that's where we're going to end today's video. In the next video, which should be coming out in the next couple of weeks, I am going to be putting the rest of the staff together, and then also making the accessories that go with it. So watch out for that video coming your way soon. So I hope you enjoyed the first part of constructing the robe a la francaise. I hope you come back to see the rest of the process. You can of course hit the subscribe button down below to be notified when I post that. You can also click the like button if you, in fact, like this video, and you can follow me on TikTok and Instagram, also at Costume and Conservation, if you so choose. Otherwise, I hope you have a fantastic day. Bye!