Fitting an 18th-century dress BY MYSELF | Making an Italian Gown pt. 1

So I'm a little bit worried about this dress because from everything that I've read and learned, you're supposed to fit this style of dress on a body, which is a little bit hard to do by yourself. And since it's in the middle of a pandemic, I'm still not comfortable enough asking a friend to help, nor do I have a functional dress form. So this is going to be interesting. I have tried to make a jacket from this time period with a different pattern, but that turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. It did not fit anywhere. It was just terrible. So this time around I'm trying a new pattern and I'm crossing my fingers that it works. If you've seen my previous videos for this project, you may remember me saying that I didn't plan on making an 18th century ensemble this year, but I just kept making random 18th century pieces and decided I might as well make the dress to go with it. Seeing as this is a pretty new to me style of gown, I'm definitely going to do a mock-up first, at least for the bodice. The skirt is pretty easy to fit, so I'm going to ignore that for now. I'm using the black snail robe a la Anglaise pattern, which is the French term for an English gown, except I'm making an Italian gown. And if you're new to the 18th century, a lot of these dresses can kind of look the same. They pretty much follow the same basic silhouette, but there are a few key differences. Black Snail is an Austrian company, so everything is printed in both English and German. Because of that, the pattern pieces can get pretty cluttered, so I'm highlighting the important bits so I can easily tell which piece is which. I'm cutting out the lining pieces from linen to do the bodice mock-up, and I can't be the only customer who keeps a giant bag of white fabric scraps. If I'm lucky, I won't have to make that many changes and I can just reuse these linen pieces for the final lining. The whole bodice is four pairs of pieces, front, back, side back, and shoulder. This is my second time using a black snail pattern. I had a really good outcome with their Regency dress that I made earlier this year. Right off the bat, first problem. I sewed this piece on upside down, so I could have ripped out two seams. Not a great start. Normally this would be fitted on a body or even a dress form, but my dress form is awful, which you will see later, so I chose not to use it, and instead I tried doing all of this fitting on myself, which was kind of hard because most of my issues were in the back. The idea with fitting is to make only one or two big adjustments at a time, because any one change can make ripple effects down the line. Firstly, it was too long, so I took up the sides at the waist. It was also too big in the waist, but that was mostly concentrated in the back. So I took the lining off and started making adjustments, and it was at this point while marking my seam allowances at the front of the bodice when I realized this bodice is cut on the straight grain. So everything I'd read up until now tells me these front bodice pieces should be cut on the bias or on the diagonal, which helps make them a little stretchy as they go around the body, but um, this isn't. Do I start over and cut these pieces on the bias and refit, or do I stick with it as is and keep on fitting? I decided that visually it won't make much of a difference, and since the current fit was already pretty good, I chose to continue. Ultimately, these were the changes I made. Raised the waistline at the sides, took space from the back out of the side seams rather than make those center back sections even more narrow, changed the waistline shape in front, adjusted the front neckline, shortened the back at the waist to account for my sway back, which is a fancy way of saying that my lower back curves in dramatically, so my overall back length is shorter than it would be if my spine were straighter. Now I just want to test out the sleeve and make sure it fits over my arm. I'm not going to try to fit the armhole yet because I'll need to do that on the dress form. It might be a little long for my taste, but I can adjust that later. Better to have it too long than too short at this point. I'm actually pleasantly surprised about how well the fitting process went. The straps didn't even need any adjustments like I was expecting. And once I got the back worked out, the front fit pretty well and it just needed some tweaks here and there. Now I think I'm ready to trace new pattern pieces and start cutting out the actual dress fabric. There was kind of a lot of drama surrounding my fabric choice, but to make a long story short, it involved an Ikea duvet cover set, a box of fabric markers, and a sudden realization of the very limited time we are gifted on this earth. So I scrapped that idea and eBayed myself a different duvet cover. This is a discontinued twin size set with a pillowcase. I'm not entirely convinced the color scheme of this fabric is super accurate for the 1780s, it seems a little too muted, but the print itself is convincing enough that I think it could work. My skirt is a little narrower than the width of the duvet, so I'll just have one center back seam. Since I only have a limited amount of this fabric, I have to get really creative in how I cut my pieces. Surprisingly, I managed to get all of my pieces cut from this fabric with some big chunks left over. And I was worried I'd need a queen size, but turns out if you're my size or a little bigger, you can probably squeeze out an Italian gown from a twin size set. But before I could work with the pretty fabric, I needed to finish up the lining. The pattern calls for boning at several parts of the bodice. Some of these channels can be made with seam allowance, but others need separate casings. For that, I'm using my one inch twill tape, which is a little wide, but hey, I've got like 70 yards of this, so I'm going to use it. I just ordered more synthetic whalebone, which, by the way, I'll link to supplies in the description. This is way more than I'll use for this project, obviously, but at least I'll have some ready for any future corset projects. One issue I'm noticing already, these bones here are just too long. I need to take them out and cut them about two inches shorter, otherwise they're going to be poking up in the back really weird. This is the second black snail pattern I've used, and I love how it comes with detailed, well-illustrated, historically accurate hand sewing instructions for assembly, which I once again will be mostly ignoring. But I am following some of the directions, like prepping all the edges of the lining before I attach the outer layer. To do that, I sewed a line of basting stitches around the entire outer edge at the stitching line. That allowed me to easily clip the curves, press the raw edges up, and baste them in place. All of these edges will get hidden later. And now I'm itching to work on the outer bodice, but oh yeah, gotta do the skirt first. I'm hemming the front edges of the skirt by hand. I'll hem the bottom edge after I work on the pleating. But before I do that, I have to cut a pocket slit in the side. The pattern kindly offers a guide for that. I'm only cutting one because I only own one pocket. And I totally burned my finger while trying to press the edges of this pocket opening. Be careful with steam, kids. After sewing that in place, I moved on to pleats. The pattern offers a handy description on figuring out the math for these pleats, but I really wanted to try doing a semi-cartridge pleat method to get perfectly spaced pleats using some tiger tape. This stuff has lines marking every quarter inch. I'm making one inch spaced stitches, and then when you pull up the threads, the fabric scrunches up like an accordion. First thing I noticed, this method definitely works better with tiny pleats. These big ones were pretty unruly and hard to keep in place. Next I have to put the whole thing on the dress form to level the hem of the skirt. This is tricky because my dress form is one of those cheap adjustable types, which is terrible in a number of ways. Number one, the screws are all plastic, so the bits that keep the body raised along the center pole don't hold well, so the entire thing slides down over time. Here I am trying to raise it up. And yes, I am not bothering to take off my World War I era corset, nor am I bothering to put this petticoat on correctly either. It's supposed to be side closing, not back, so the pleats are all wonky, but oh well. Number two, the adjustable aspect seems cool until you have to adjust it while clothes are on the form. Here I am reaching up into the guts of the form to close the waist so I can get this petticoat to fit. And another issue, while you can technically pin into this, you can only pin parallel to the form, not directly into it, which is a struggle. Just do not buy one of these. Also, maybe I did my math wrong or my measurements wrong, but it seemed like way more fabric was concentrated toward the front of the skirt rather than the back, so I had to manipulate the pleats to more evenly distribute the fullness of the fabric. So in the end, I practically just eyeballed these pleats anyway, so I'm not even sure if my stitches even mattered. That wasn't nearly as annoying as the fact that this stupid dress form kept sinking into the ground every time I tried to pin it. Seriously, I raised this thing back up like four times. I was a little worried the front skirt opening was too wide, but it looks like the one in the book, so I think it's okay. By now I was so frustrated with the dress form that I took the dress off, moved it to the table, and secured the pleats as best I could with pins, then basted them down by machine rather than try to baste them by hand and risk all the pleats falling apart. And of course, I accidentally sewed over a huge chunk of my bodice lining. Well, after a lot of trial and error, the skirt is basted to the lining, but ugh, I am pretty tired of all this and I think I'm just gonna take a break for now. I think it will look okay, but after this I have the outer bodice to add. I think this is a good stopping point for this video. Honestly, sometimes fitting takes longer than the actual assembly of the garment. You may have heard the saying, sewing is easy, fitting is hard. That's certainly true and although I didn't need much fit adjustments, fitting certainly doesn't give me that feeling of accomplishment like sewing a pretty pretty dress. But it's a necessary first step and it shouldn't be skipped. I'm really pleased with this pattern so far. I haven't had any issues that weren't my own fault, like the pleats and the dress form. The shape seems to be pretty accurate and I'm hoping the extra boning in the bodice will give it some good structure. If you've ever sewn an 18th century dress, I want to know about your experience, so comment below. What's your preferred method of front closures? This pattern calls for hooks and eyes, but I've seen some dresses with hidden interlacing and of course most dresses were just closed with straight pins. However, this dress has boning in the center front, so I'm not sure if the pinning method will work. What do you think? In a couple weeks I'll have part two out, which I'll put a link to that in the description. I'll be finishing the bodice, having the skirt, and doing the most important and scariest part, sleeve fitting. So be sure to subscribe. In the meantime, I'll link to my other 1780s projects if you want to catch up. I'll see you next time and until then, happy sewing!