18th Century Waistcoat continued:


Through the last couple of weeks the waistcoat has taken great shape. In this making process I have been very precious with all my stitching lines. I wanted to create a final piece I would be proud of.
However this has meant taking longer on sections are re doing pieces, the extra time taken has been very worth while though.

In the construction of the waistcoat the first thing we had to do, after cutting out the fabric, was creating the pockets on the waistcoat front. This was a daunting thing to do as the first process as it meant snipping into your fabric to create the pocket mouth. If you do this stage wrong then the look of the garment will be ruined.
You had to be extremely careful with your measurements through this stage and also make sure everything matched on the other side of the waistcoat. It was an extremely fiddly process to get correct and on one half of my pocket the uprights of the pocket mouth were very slanted instead of upright.
I could either leave the pocket mouth like that and hope that with prick stitching that it would look better or I would have to cut out the front again.
Even though I lost time I cut out a whole new front of my waistcoat and re did the pocket. This was a great learning curve for me as it taught me the delicacy of costume making and a chance to re do my mistakes rather than just leaving them.

Once the pockets were assemble the waistcoat could be put together in its two half, the lining waistcoat and the front of the waistcoat, these processes were reasonable easy and came together well.

The next very time consuming aspect of the waistcoat was the decoration. Our tutor wanted the front of the waistcoats decorated as they would have been in the 18th century.
 However  in the 18th century waistcoats would have been heavy embroidered by hand which would just not have been possible for us.

Below are some examples of the embroidery of the time:

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://en.madeira.de/uploads/tx_twgallery/Waistcoat.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.madeira.de/impressions/impressions-2/&h=755&w=492&sz=97&tbnid=pYmY6dYjANDqkM:&tbnh=95&tbnw=62&zoom=1&docid=vQKS7kg4PTJb5M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Th-5T9etDJPs8QPl4fGQCg&

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.vintagetextile.com/images/Early/2196.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.vintagetextile.com/new_page_562.htm&h=495&w=600&sz=115&tbnid=GLSMi4YIFH4HSM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=1

The decoration we hand stitched to our waistcoats was much less detailed than this. However within the short time scale we had to complete our garment a lot of care and time was needed to apply the braiding we were given. to make sure the braiding was straight and that the stitching we did to attach the braiding to the front of the waistcoat was as invisible as possible.

We took extra time on the braiding to make sure it was perfect, however this did cause us to take longer with the final construction of our waistcoat so we did not complete it on time.
The extra time we took with the braid made a hug difference to the final finished garment however so was worth the extra care.

Once the braiding was complete the waistcoat was easy to assemble the hems were stitched together, then we slip stitched the arm holes, the facing an the lining together, machine stiched the collar on an the slip stitched the lining to the collar.

The final touches were the buttons and button holes.

Below are the final image: