Coat Series Step 3 - Finish the Front Panels

With 18th century clothing, you do all the hard stuff up front then you piece it all together when you're done. It's a very strange process to modern sewers, who are used to putting the garment together first, then doing all the finishing work.

Diderot describes the process as first completing the buttonholes, then adding the buttons, and finally adding the pocket bags and pockets. This is the best order to follow because it allows you to fit your semi-finished coat after finishing the buttonholes and make any adjustments to the side seams before placing the pockets. If you finish the pockets before the buttonholes, your pockets will not be centered if you have to make adjustments.

Buttons and Button Holes

Contrary to modern sewing practices, buttons and buttonholes should be finished before sewing together the coat and installing the lining. This approach helps minimize the stitching showing on the inside of the coat from the buttons and the holes. If you buttonholes are not functional your lining will be completely flawless. Otherwise you have the option to piece the lining in between the functional holes, or simply cut small slashes in the lining and then secure the openings in place with a slip stitch.

Button Stand Prep

The button side will require the installation of an extra piece of interfacing for the button stand to provide extra support. I covered this in the interfacing write up but will cover it again here.

The button stand piece should be about two times as wide a the button, and it is installed on the right front of the garment. Baste the piece in place from the inside, and sew the outside edge down (you can sew it to the main interfacing piece). After securing the button stand on the edge, you are should sew a tiny running stitch outlining that is seen in many coat on the inside of the coat. The distance of this stitch from the outside of the garment should be the size of the button plus 1/2 inch, giving you 1/4 of space on each side of the button. The finial result can be seen in the pictures.

Draw on the Buttonholes

Draw the line line for your bottom buttonhole only in chalk on your coat. You will then need to draw another 9 button holes on the coat between the bottom button hole and the top of the coat. Depending on your height, the distance between the holes is somewhere between 2-2 1/4 inches.

Although the buttonholes appear to slope when worn on a person, they are actually all parallel when drawn on a flat surface. To easily draw parallel lines, I use a quilter's ruler and tailor's chalk. Getting the proper distance in between the holes may take some trial and error but luckily tailor's chalk comes out when rubbed with a scrap piece of fabric.

After drawing the lines, you will need to mark the start point of your buttonholes (make it consistently  between 1/4-1/2 inch from the edge; I do 1/4 inch), the end point of your buttonholes, and the point marking the end of the buttonhole opening if you are including decorative long work.

A few things to remember about buttonholes:

• Fashionable 18th century button holes are approximately 2.5 times a large as the button. If you have a 1 inch button, your buttonhole should be 2.5 inches long. 
• Although your buttonhole may be 2.5 times as long as the button, button opening average 1.5 times the size of the buttonhole on 18th century garment. That means for a 1 inch button, only 1.5 inches of the buttonhole is open, the remaining 1 inch is closed and purely decorative.
• Not all buttonholes are functional, depending on the period and manner of construction. Only the top four buttons are functional on most 1770's era coats, which means the remaining 6 buttonholes are purely decorative. 

Sew the Buttonholes
I'm not really going to cover the stitching technique, since I'll just tell you the same thing that numerous other people will tell you. Instead, here's a video from Fort Ticonderoga that highlights the button stitch method. The key to a good buttonhole is even stitching and tension on the thread. Don't worry if your first buttonhole looks terrible, they'll start to look good after you've sewn a thousand.

You will notice that Stuart mentions gimp thread. You don't really need to use it for purely functional buttonholes with no ornamentation. If you are doing any sort of long work, I strongly recommend it. It will make your buttonholes pop and look so much better than without. I use colored 18/3 Londonderry Linen thread, which can be purchased from various online book binding supply stores.

I cannot stress this one point enough: DO NOT CUT YOUR BUTTONHOLES WITH SCISSORS! Use a chisel. Even the cheapest chisel from a hardware store is going to work better than a pair of scissors that will stretch your fabric.

If any of your buttonholes are functional, they will be sewn through the outside fabric and the interfacing only at this point. There are two methods of attaching the lining, which I will cover later in the series.

Button Placement

Once the buttonholes are sewn, pin the two wrong sides together to determine the correct placement of the buttons. Mark the placement point for each button in the center of the button stand using chalk. For functional buttonholes, you'll be able to stick a piece of chalk in the opening and make a mark at the center point for the button. For non-functional holes, you'll need to mark the edge of the buttonhole and estimate where the button should sit on the button stand.

If using using cloth-covered or thread buttons, simply sew the buttons in place. If using metal buttons, you will punch holes in garment using an awl then secure the buttons in place from the inside of the garment using a piece of linen tape. The tape will run along the button stand from the inside, then go through the hole to the outside of the garment, run through the button shank, and then go back inside the garment. After running the tape through all the metal buttons, whip stitch the tape in place. 

Check the Fit

The proper tight fir that hugs the body and then tapers after the fourth button.

Now that you have the buttons and buttonholes finished, you need to check the fit. Checking fit is very important because you are going to start cutting into the coat when you do the pockets. If you don't check fit and end up needing to adjust seams after doing your pockets, it will move your pocket flaps off center, and you want your pockets to be centered

Baste all of the torso pieces together and make sure that everything fits properly. It should be TIGHT without constraint. If it fits like a modern coat, it's too loose. Take in or extend seams as required and make the necessary adjustments to the side seams on the fabric.

Unlined Frock

Time to take a breaking from doing things for myself and do something for someone else. A good friend of mine and awesome living historian asked me to make him an unlined wool frock coat. He' super excited about it, and I think I am just as excited. I love the look of a finely tailored (and historically correct) man's 18th century garment, and it's even more rewarding to see someone happy with their garment.

For this project, I'm using a green broadcloth from my friends and Burnley and Trowbridge, who's retirement home I am probably financing. This coat will be a 7.5 inches shorter than a full-length skirt and unlined, which allows you to wear it though the dog days of summer while only being mildly uncomfortable. I often joke that wool is a "not quite" textile. It will keep you warm in the winter, but not quite warm enough. It will keep you cool in the summer, but not quite as cool as you'd like to be.

 So far, I have body interfaced, the backs completed, and the sleeves completed. Next, I will move on to installing the pockets, buttonholes, and then it's onto assembly.

This picture is the basted together body, ready for a fitting, before I tear it all apart again. You know, true 18th century process.

This project, is going to feature, quite a few cool 18th century nuances, including the cape (collar) and pocket flap linings being done in and historically correct serge instead of linen, and the interfacing being done in a manner that is consistent with period garments.

There are also going to be a few surprises that I have not told my customer about yet, that I'm really excited about and will talk about in a future post.

Lamentations of a Living Historian

I don't like to vent, but occasionally I have to. If you're reading this blog, you probably have as strange of tastes in leisure activities as I do, so maybe you'll find this interesting, or maybe it'll piss you off. Here's my vent: Costumers are driving me nuts.

I get it, people like to dress up in clothing that makes them feel something different than how they feel on the inside. Look at any high-ranking military uniform from any historic empire and you will see exactly what I'm talking about. I make and wear historic clothing with for the study and experience of 18th century life, and to hopefully have that occasional moment of true living history. I am a living historian.

The modern people that like to make clothing, whether it be historic, historically inspired, or fictional, only to wear them, are called costumers.

In the past few weeks, I've been at odds with a few costumers with an arrogant yet highly sophomoric knowledge (and attitudes) of the 18th century, history in general, and research. The individuals that I speak of typically are self-declared experts in 18th century reproduction clothing.

They have made such declarations after making a few historic costumes, using modern techniques, by reading a few non-academic books or websites. When confronted with citing sources or constructive criticism to make their clothing better, they immediately deflect and wonder how you, someone not making silk court clothing, would ever challenge their expertise, for you only dress in linen and wool; whereas, they dress in silk.

Ok, so that's a hyperbolic simplification, but it does sum up a few conversations that I've had. If you want to be a costumer and have no interested in historic authenticity, that's cool with me. Please do it away from the living historians so that our inboxes are not commonly getting spammed. It would also be nice, if you would stop giving the general public incorrect information, but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.

My experiences have led me to create My Two Truths of being a good living historian:

1.  Research is Hard, the Application is Harder, Proper Recreation is Near Impossible, but it will lead to the occasional true moment of existential living history.
2. History is uncomfortable, but confronting the uncomfortable is necessary to understanding and learning from our past. 

Research, research, research. Do it! 

Research is the key thing that separates the living historian from the costumer. It is very easy to watch a movie or TV show, look a portrait, or extant garment, and find a way to make a copy. You could probably find a pattern, fabric, notions, and have a plan to make something that looks like what you're trying to recreate.

Will it be historically correct? Hell no. You did an hour worth of googling. Did you think you'd have a museum quality reproduction? People who have been doing this for decades still learn new things every day. They get this knowledge from studying original garments and reading primary sources on how the clothing was made. I understand that 99 percent of us do not have the ability to perform a hands-on study of an original, but there are plenty of academic books on the breakdowns of experts who have published their findings.

Sorry, but a costuming or coffee table book with no credible or "this is how I do it" is not a citeable source. It may be good information, it may even be the correct information, but levels of research need to be appropriately classified based on bona fide accuracy.

Research is difficult, whether it be uncovering the methods for making clothing, then actually doing it in the style, or cooking on a hearth using an 18th century recipe. It takes a long time to gather all the information, that you can then apply to actually do something with it.

Luckily, museums and universities are embracing globalism and putting vast details on the internet that you used to have to travel all over the world to see and hope that you noticed every detail the first time.

Confront the Uncomfortable and Learn

History is uncomfortable. Humans have been doing terrible things to other humans probably since the beginning of our existence. The time period that I research is full of all sorts of atrocities to 21st century society. There's slavery, indentured servitude, public torture and punishment, execution for entertainment, classism, sexism, racism--you name it, it's there. 

Pretty much every deplorable societal trait that modern society hypocritically likes to think that we've evolved beyond, existed in the 18th century. You can't rewrite it (just as 200 years from now, we won't be able to rewrite the terrible things our society has done or ignored), you have to confront it or else you won't learn from it and truly change it. Unfortunately, a lot of this institutions still exist in this country (slavery being one of them, albeit under a different name)

History is not silk gowns and embroidered suits. If you don't want to get dirty, stick to the conventions and photoshoots, and leave the history to the professionals.