Uncovering the Mysterious Secrets of 1890's Ball Skirts!

How did they get their dresses to look like this? How did they manage to get all that floofy silk to have such a dramatic shape? And how the actual heck did they keep it clean? Because there's a lot more to getting that gorgeous flowing train on that ball gown you just made than flatlining some silk onto some muslin and then slapping it on over your corset and petticoat. This is one of the most important things you'll ever learn about late 19th century dressmaking and nobody ever talks about it except in passing. We're going on a total deep dive today because like you, I am tired of having limp, soft, flaccid trains. This is fantastical Follies costuming. We like our trains stiff. In order to get that truly historical look, we need to utilize historical techniques. And we start by building a foundation skirt. If you watched my recent natural form video, you know a little bit about this. But foundation skirts were incredibly common starting in the late Victorian period. These are made from the same pattern as the overskirt except a couple of inches shorter and take the place of the flatlining that we see in earlier eras. And it's weird because you don't see historical costumers, especially here on YouTube, utilizing this handy and frankly money-saving technique. It's time to change that. When you're looking at historical fashion plates and extant garments, you can tell if something has been built on a foundation skirt because you can see the little dust ruffle peeking out of the bottom. We're going to be building a late 1890s ball gown skirt today, but the techniques in this video are period accurate from the natural form era in the mid-1870s through the second bustle era into the 1890s and beyond. It's super useful. Hello! We have a fully assembled foundation skirt and a bottle smock up, but don't worry about that. That's for another video. Yesterday, I dip dyed the bottom of this in my dye bath while I was dying some other things that you'll see later. It looks kind of weird now, but I think that was the right decision because if I have to pick this up, you will see the blue underneath instead of this color, which was supposed to be lime green and is more like sad lime. So this is almost completely together. I still have to put in the placket and the pockets, and I do want to show you. So the pockets are supposed to go between the side back and the side front panel. Normally, I would put them up here, which is, you know, where it's comfortable for me to put my hands in, but because this is fairly fitted down through the hips, I'm going to lower it. If you can see my little pin here, it's about, I don't know, 10 inches or so. So it's going to be a little awkward to dig into my pockets, but I would rather it be a little awkward and not mess up the line of my skirt. With all of that done, now we can turn our attention to the menace, aka the train, and getting the train to stand out as well as the rest of the skirt, right? I call it the menace because it is wreaking absolute havoc in my tiny apartment. So I apologize for all the little bits of thread you're going to see on this fabric from now until the end of the video. There is nothing I can do about it. They just, it's like a magnet. So no matter how many times I sweep, there's little threads everywhere. All of these historical garments were faced to the nines. This is the secret to getting all of that beautiful structure, that gorgeous sweep of the train, even if you're using the most ethereal of fabrics. Step number one, our trusty horsehair braid. A more historical material would be strips of crinoline cut about three and a half inches wide. This is two inch braid, which I've used on several other projects before. I am severely over budget for this project. So our theme for today is using what you have instead of buying more stuff. But wait, before we sew it on, what do you think I should have added first? That's right. The other part of the facing. So, uh, let's undo that bit and pretend it never happened. This is lightweight collar buckram that I got from Mood. A more historical material would be tarlatan, but I haven't yet found a good resource for that. So if you have one, please share it in the comments. The front of this is fairly straightforward. Cut to the skirt pattern eight inches high. The back, on the other hand, this is the back panel. This is the center back right here. Whoop. It looks real weird. It looks almost like a giant 1890 sleeve. Hmm. No. It took me more than three hours to noodle this out last night, partially because I just didn't have enough fabric and partially because I had no idea how to do it. I did not film it for obvious reasons. So this is the center back that is literally the length that is on the floor plus eight inches on the train. And then it comes down to about 10 inches here. Is that how they would do it? Probably not. But please just let me be proud of what I've accomplished. So let's get her on. Ignore that. If we can unhook the menace from the ironing board and get it to stay on the darn table. Sure enough, my cutting was off and I've had to make some adjustments in the center back. I split the seam and I've hand basted it down for now. And then we'll take this random scrap of buckram and stick it in the gap and prep for the next step. Now I get to feed this monstrosity through the sewing machine twice, two more days until dry January is over. Okay, now that that huge obstacle is done, it is time to turn. That was funnier in my head. All right. So this is where I sort of got myself in trouble. And of course, it's right at the center back where it's the most important to get right. But I digress. So this wasn't quite the right length. So I've got this pinned just, you know, against the horsehair here and I will hand tack that down. And then in the center here, I've got this little bit of random buckram that I'm just going to, again, I'm just going to hand tack this down. I could probably do it on the machine, but it'll be easier to do by hand and it won't take that long. And it is really handy to have a moving table like this because I can move this right to where my ironing board is and I can iron directly onto the table. I do wish that I had bought a better table than this one is really rickety, but it serves this purpose and it is quite handy. Okay, so that is all tacked down there. And then we're still going around and we're, we're tacking this up at the top. And don't be afraid if it buckles a little, even though this is, you know, technically the same shape as the skirt underneath, you are still going to get a little bit of weirdness because it's round. Now this is, this is bias cut and it's not a straight line. So don't be afraid to make little tucks if you need. For example, I've got a little tuck here that I, I just ironed in. No big deal. Nobody's going to see it. This is the inside. And because nobody's going to see it, you should have no qualms about securing this via the machine, the modern way, instead of hand stitching 200 inches of buckram down with a herringbone stitch. So if you want to interface this further, you can, historically they were, you can add a layer of cotton mull or flannel to this to get that truly heavy, dramatic terrain. They also faced over all of that structure, but since all of the major airlines have started taking advantage of us and are nickel and diming us for things that we should be entitled to when traveling halfway across the freaking country, like checking your bags without having to pay extra money for them. I personally have to get this epic ball gown into a small carry on roller bag. So I have to consider space and weight when making this as well as structure. So I've opted to forgo the facing and the flannel. And if the airline situation ticks you off as much as it ticks me off, do me a favor and give this video a thumbs up and fish shake at me in the comments. Now that we're nice and stiff, it's time to do some fluffing. And how do we do that? You ask? With a crap ton of stripping. That bit was too good not to do. So I spent the last like two days just cutting strips of fabric, so many strips of fabric. And that is really going to be the name of the game for this first fluffy bit is going to be the dust ruffle. Here's the center of the strip marked and the width that we need to pleat it to. My skirt is just under 200 inches in circumference. I think the actual official measurement is 196. You need at least three times your circumference length to do the pleats. I ended up with eight total strips of fabric. So I divided my skirt into eighths and I'm pleating each strip into that. Historically, these pleats would be much narrower, like quarter inch pleats, but they also sent them out to professionals to be pleated. They didn't do it themselves. And since that service is no longer available, and if it is, it's outrageously expensive. And I am doing this on my own. I'm just going to do half inch ones, ish. Because the pleat is going to be so large, I've opted here to use some fusible tape to hold it together instead of pinning every single pleat and then machine basting. There are some cons to this method. It's quite sticky for one, it doesn't always stick where you want it, and occasionally it leaves residue on your ironing board. But it has a fun pro. I'll show you in a minute. Now that the... Oh. Wait a minute. Ha! There, that's better. I'm currently breaking my shoes in for the ball, and I'm suddenly in average height. I told you I was short. Here is our little cabbage, aka our dust ruffle, and we are ready to put this onto the bottom of the skirt. And because we used that sticky, sticky tape, you can tack it to the edge of your skirt with your iron, no basting required. After hemming, I've got a two inch pleat. You want this to hang over the hemmed edge of your skirt by half an inch. So you'd measure up and mark an inch and a half to keep everything nice and even. Then when everything's tacked, you'd sew it on like normal. Okay, let's move on to the next step, which is the belayuse. Nobody ever talks about these things, but they are a game changer for your trained gowns. A belayuse is a more complicated version of the dust ruffle we've already put on the bottom of this skirt. There are different styles and different methods from using a single large ruffle fixed to the bottom of the gown to the full on extra piece that you cut to the shape of your train. But the main idea is simple. It protects your fancy fabric from the crap on the floor and gives more structure to your train to help keep it out and fabulous. Materials can vary from the practical and very washable muslin to the friffiest, floofiest, fanciest lace. This is the belayuse that I made for my 1890s tea gown. It's floofy! I made this out of just basic cotton muslin, and it does very well for this tea gown. Literally just the actual shape of the train in the back, and it starts small on the side seam and then gets bigger as you go towards the center back. I used the pattern that was provided with the Laughing Moon pattern for the actual tea gown, and I do have a whole video on making that tea gown if you'd like to watch it. It was very easy, and I think it's great for swanning around the house. However, there are a couple of downsides. The first is, using the muslin, it's very heavy. Like I mentioned before, I've got to get this in a small suitcase, so I'm going to use something a little bit lighter weight and a little bit easier to compress for the traveling. I also don't love the color of it. Even though it fits perfectly underneath the actual fabric, it does flip up and you will see that muslin as I'm walking around. For the ball gown, I want the balayeuse to actually kind of match and look nice with the ball gown because you're going to see it, especially I plan to loop it up so that I can dance without dragging everything in it getting stuck on. So for my fancy balayeuse, I'm going to use stiff cotton organy. I got this from Pure Silks. I'll link to it down below. They will dye it the color that you want. It's not that much more expensive. If we weren't dealing with tariff nonsense, I probably would have done that, but we are dealing with tariff nonsense, so I just bought the white, and I'll hand dye it myself. This is my bottom balayeuse piece, and if you're thinking it looks really weird, it's because my train is shaped really weird. I literally traced this off of the actual train itself, spent almost an hour today looking for the other piece of my balayeuse, cannot find it anywhere. So I'm going to show you the CBF version of the other side of this, and maybe you'll want to do it this way too. This is the seam between the back and the side back. I've drawn the hem, and it's going to go to slightly more than three inches. Can you, no, you can't see that. Here. So this is the side seam between the side front and the side back. And this is a pen. I'm going to start here, done. Like pretty much everything else that we've done so far in this project, the balayeuse is assembled, and we have serged the top edge and fine hemmed the bottom edge. And now we're ready to start stripping. Since I lost my OG side piece, we'll just eyeball the lines. We're going to start with a row of ruffles that extend from the side here. Each row will be three inches apart with a half inch overlap of ruffles. Then with all your lines drawn, measure out your ruffle strips. You want these ruffles to be at least two and a half times the length of each row. Now we get to hem a gazillion yards of organdy. I know what you're thinking. Jackie. No. Use me, Jackie. No. Use me. No. For every minute you save me going through the machine, I waste two pulling out when you mess up. Uh-uh. Ah! Thank you so much to all of my Ko-Fi contributors. Your continued support means so much. I could not have even dreamed of making this ball gown without you. I'm so happy to be able to share these videos with everyone here. Whether you do contribute over on Ko-Fi or if you just come back week after week to watch the chaos. Things are so bad in the world right now. It's nice to have this quirky little corner of the internet to unwind in. With everything hemmed at the bottom and gathered at the top, we can go ahead and start putting it onto our foundation. When you finish sewing on your ruffles, hit them with a shot of steam from your iron. Make sure that it's only steam and you're not pressing down on the ruffles with the iron so that you're not flattening them down. Well friends, there's one thing that you can say about me. My math sucks. So pardon this interruption while I go dye some more strips of cotton organdy. In the meantime, let's contemplate the last step of this process because it would not be an 1890s ball gown without the frou-frou. This involves, you guessed it, more strips and strips of fabric. This time in the form of some beautiful black silk organza. Ah, BRB. Greetings from the next day. It is 5pm on Monday and I have about a 30 minute window in which anything that I want to get in this video before it goes out at 1pm on Thursday needs to be filmed. And my re-dyed organdy looks like this. I'm not 100% sure why it looks like that because I did measure the dye. It's either because it was the very bottom of the pot of dye and it just wasn't mixed right or as I've kind of figured out in the past, because there was so little of it and it is so lightweight and open, there just wasn't enough dye to get it to the darker color of the other organdy. Even though I waited, that's happened to me a couple of times and I suspect that might be what the case is. However, now I need to re-dye it because it's too significant a color difference to let it be the way it is. People are going to see this ball I use. It needs to look uniform. Because I was doing all of that last night, I didn't have time to work on the organza for the frou-frou and since I don't really need either of those right now because the skirt is in embroidery and beading stage right now and I'm nowhere near ready to attach it to the waistband and the foundation skirt. So I'm going to take this as a definite sign from the universe that this is a good place to stop the video. I wish I could say that I could just wait to put this video out until everything was done but I am still a very small channel and ya girls gotta hustle. So I think the most logical thing to do is to show you the finished ball I use and the finished ruffle and how they get tacked to the bottom of the foundation skirt in the final skirt video. Hey, congrats for making it to the end of the video. You get a gold star. If you'd like to see how we finish this off, you can check out this video here. Or if you're watching before that frankly epic make goes live, YouTube is telling me you would love this one here. That's it for me. Thanks for watching. I love y'all and I'll catch you in my next video.