Sewing Scot: a tale of four bustles

This post was originally meant to tack on at the end of my Victorian undergarments one, but things developed and I decided to split them up.  As the title suggests this is a tale of 4 bustle cages.  Originally this was 3 (I know, too many already), but then one thing lead to another and now I have 3.5, so if anyone wants to borrow one...

Sit down, folks, and let me tell you the tale of four bustles.  Once upon a time a seamstress bought a pattern for a bustle cage, to support the fine gown she wanted to make.  The pattern came with 2 different sizes, a normal and an imperial.  The normal was for the 1870s, whilst the other was for the more voluptuous 1880s.  However, the seamstress had been dazzled by 1870s fashion plates, and thought to herself, they're just as big as the 1880s.  Despite her thoughts, she made the normal sized bustle cage.

She looked and she twirled, but no matter how she thought about it, the bustle was too small, and far too heavy for its size.  She decided to try the imperial sized in the hopes that it would give her all she wanted.  After ordering some fine stripey cotton, she got to work, but not before she had altered the pattern for the front.

Stripey!

Once she put on the bustle she was finally happy with its size, and the lightness of weight, but she felt it a bit flimsy, and in danger of being squashed under the weight of all the highly fashionable skirts of the day.  Cotton drill was too heavy, cotton was too light, then how about twill?  She should have some in the ever growing stash.
Poplin was all she could find, and a mysterious fabric she couldn't remember buying, and that she couldn't properly identify.  Sure it was cotton, but not quite being able to tell if it was in fact drill, she snatched it up anyway, and thought might as well, it's been there for long long I can't remember where I got it from.  Not wanting to use anymore useful bias binding, she retrieved the 25m roll of tartan binding she had, and set to work on a third bustle.

If anyone recognises this fabric, please do tell

She had sewed one side seam together when distraction struck, and she abandoned it in the corner.

My first abandoned project.

So the Truly Victorian bustle cage goes together really well.  I originally ordered a complete kit, which came with white cotton drill.  The pattern states for 3 panels sewn together for the bottom ruffle, and altogether I found the first bustle slightly heavier than I was expecting, and as mentioned before too small.  I was too stingy to buy the other TV pattern, the wired petticoat, which is based on an 1870s example, that probably would have given the right size, but I intend in the future to do the 1880s, so no loss making it now.  The striped cotton is 100%, but it's really thin, despite not being lawn, and I found (and you can see), that it sort of caves in between the top two bones.  Not entirely sure why this happened, and due to the thinness of the fabric anyway, I thought it best to try a third time in a thicker cotton.  This fabric is strange for many reasons; I can't remember where I got it, I'm not entirely sure what it is, and it stretches on the bias quite a bit.  Whether this is actually 100% cotton or not is beyond me.  It kind of feels like a drill, but has too much give for that.  Whatever it is, at least it's pretty.  I thought I labelled all of the fabrics in the stash, and I did for the cotton poplin I have hiding in there, but this one didn't have a label, and there looked to be only about 2 metres.  Fom the pictures we can see the good old tartan bias binding coming out. It is a bit bigger than the steel boning, but I made do.

Before I had finished bustle number 3 I got quite concerned about the stretch it had.  This definitely wasn't just normal bias stretch, the fabric stretched quite well on the cross-grain (horizontally?) as well.  Afraid that the boning would eventually stretch it out, I hurriedly began to look for a nice cotton twill.  Ironically, after my searching, I came across a lovely back and white cotton drill stripe (the colours I had wanted originally).  I had altered the ruffle at the bottom during my second attempt, and so done again with a drill shouldn't be as heavy.  Alternatively I could also make the bottom frill out of a lighter fabric.  The cotton drill came and I got to work straight away, more than aware that deadlines are looming and I only have undergarments to wear.

Good old tartan bias binding for the bone casings

One front panel

Before I could sew the third last casing to the back panel the bulb in my sewing machine decided to give out after 2.5 years.  This put a very abrupt stop to my work for a day or two until the new one came.  When it did I finished the rest of the casings, the ruffle and put it all together.  And it sat there for a few days until I had the strength of mind to file the ends of all those bones.

I worked on the petticoat at the same time as the third bustle.  Last year my petticoat was really, really heavy.  So much so that it dragged down at the back, and took my hoop along with it.  I made it out of 100% cotton, and put a lot of ruffles on it.  I won't make the same mistake twice.  Because I don't have a tree that grows money, I also didn't want to buy a separate petticoat pattern, so I bought the TV 1870s underskirt pattern.  This serves as my mock-up, and petticoat.  You can add a bottom pleat/ruffle, but I find I'm not so good with them (last year's one was too big, and too long at the hem), it also adds more weight.

This year I used cotton lawn, because it's lighter and I have a lot of it lying around (I bought 10m thinking I would need it all, but ended up finding 4 more metres stashed away in a bag; I'm drowning in the stuff).  Cotton lawn comes in different qualities.  I know this must sound weird, lawn is lawn, but I'm finding that's not always the case.  My usual suppliers runs out of it regularly, so I have a few more.  The lawn for the petticoat comes from a completely different supplier, and one I've never used before.  I bought lawn once from sew curvy, and it was thicker than the stuff I usually get from my original supplier, which is much thinner.  The stuff used to make this skirt is really light and thin, so as a result the petticoat is so light it's frightening.

For bustle petticoats you attach ribbon, or tape, to the two side-back seams and tie them together, this is to stop the pleats from falling around the bustle instead of over it.  Even without ruffles the petticoat still covers the wires of the cage underneath.  Considering I intend to make my underskirt out of quite sturdy cotton, I might whip up another petticoat in proper cotton.

I had a bit of a sizing issue with the waistband. I thought it was going to be too small, so added on another 2 inches; this notion turned out to be false, so now I've got a 4 inch overlap instead of a 2" one.  Eventually I put the tape between the seams but found that it did relatively nothing apart from pull the two SB seams further back, making the pleats fall over them towards the front.  I went back and looked at the instructions and realised that it was a casing you had to sew to the back panel of the skirt, and then thread ribbon, tape, whatever, through the casing and tie it that way.  Too late for the cotton lawn petticoat, but not so with the cotton poplin one.

I quickly whipped up the petticoat with the cotton poplin, putting the good old tartan bias binding channel on the back panel, and it worked perfectly.

You can see the channel where the tape is to keep all of the volume to the back

Because I forgot to measure the legnth of it to be a petticoat (shorter than it would normally be) I put a large pintuck near the hem, because that's what I do with every undergarment now, apparently.

And after that I had my undergarments finished. Now onto the evening wear.