Cutting out makes me think of freeing mastodons from glaciers
If this is Saturday, I must be sewing trousers. I’ve managed overalls in a day from cutting out to made up, lacking only buttons and buttonholes, so I have hope for the trousers. It is true I am starting a new pattern, and so I am considering adapting the pattern I already use for breeches and overalls…. except that the style is 20 years out of date for where these are going. At least the first pair is for the kid, for whom oddly-fitted clothes are the norm now because of his size and personality, and would have been then, since he’s not the son of gentry.
He’s got shoes, though, and they fit! His feet stopped at size 12 in fall 2011, and the 12.5 Fugawee straight-lasted Ligonier shoes fit him over his winter socks. His feet are just too big not to put into better shoes–no one can help noticing them, and there are no gaiters to hide them under.
We’ll see how leather-soled shoes go. Expect slipping and falling.
Dining/sewing/library room with “assistant”
My plan is to knock out the trousers today to the point of finishing work, and then finish the waistcoat tomorrow (it lacks only buttons and buttonholes). Having spent Tuesday on costume research scrutinizing seams, and blinking at buttonholes from 1788-1800, I feel better (and less self-conscious) about my sewing skills. They’re not as awful as I think they are, and the worst part of the tan waistcoat was the placement of the buttonholes, not their actual execution. Of course, the placement is the part I can’t fix…
On another note, on Tuesday I also looked at a number of ways to do pockets in breeches and jackets. Some were chamois lined, and then I wondered, how do we know what kind of leather the pockets are lined in? Aren’t they more likely to be deerskin than actual chamois? It doesn’t take long before you’re down the rabbit hole of historical wonderings.
Kitty Calash 
I like your multi purpose room! 🙂
That pattern looks really interesting! Not like any other trouser or knickers pattern I’ve seen, tho, and I only suppose its because of the drop front shaping? I’d love to get any thoughts as you put them together–adjustments for body shape, etc. for me, making pants has always been a big struggle to get the stride right, so that when someone is standing it doesn’t bunch, and when they sit it’s comfy and the don’t split out the seat!! Any words of wisdom?
Tx,
Nancy
It is different from the Mill Farm pattern, that’s for sure. The drop front seems narrow, though I am making the 30″ waist ones for the Young Mr. The seat seems not quite large enough to accommodate movement, and I know of a pair that were ripped last December 1st. I think the secret will be a diamond crotch gusset, which I have seen in a boy’s skeleton suit. The Young Mr is rather tube-shaped, so these may work; his squirminess will be the test.
For his shoes you can get these little sticky “no-slip” stickers for the bottom, I put them on the bottom of all my my leather bottom shoes. I just got my husband his first pair of Robert Lands, and with a bad knee, he’ll have the no-slips before he wears them to an event.
Great idea, thanks! My husband needs them for his Robert Land’s, too. I’ve heard some interesting stories about skating to the back of a store in reenacting shoes with steel rims–funny in retrospect, awful and dangerous in fact.