This dress started life before I was born. As a French tablecloth.

Fashion on the Ration rules allow me to purchase secondhand clothing and fabric items coupon-free as long as they come in below a certain price threshold. The threshold is set low enough that I usually can’t thrift in London, but while behind enemy lines in Strasbourg I picked up a vintage tablecloth for €2. With that print, it was crying out to be made into a classic 60s shift dress. This pattern dates from 1968.

The fabric was limp, had transparency issues in places and didn’t feel particularly nice against the skin, so I decided to give it body and softness by underlining it. I stripped off the back of an old Ikea duvet cover thoughtfully donated by a friend (thanks, Lila!), dyed it chocolate brown with Dylon and used that as underlining, which didn’t complicate things as much as I’d thought because the dress consisted of only three main pieces (1 front, 2 back).

Ease seems to be the randomizing factor in any given pattern. You never know until you pull the pieces out of the envelope and compare them against your body measurements whether a size 12 will actually be an 8, 10 or 16. In this case, the pattern was marked for a 32.5″ bust but, even though I am a 34″, I ended up taking it in rather than grading it up. The ease around the bust was fine for a 34″, but the waist lacked any shape and there was way too much room at the hips. I redrew the waist curves to give a bit more definition and slimmed down the hips by about 2″.

It’s interesting. A dress like this must be custom-fitted to look even halfway decent. That’s incredibly easy for the home dressmaker — this pattern, for instance, has only three seams and four darts — but in RTW, women expect dresses to fit right off the rack, so custom-fitting isn’t really an option. This means the simple dart-fitted dress has become something of a rare bird. When I wear one around London, people register it as unusual without really knowing why. (A massive screaming psychedelic print doesn’t hurt, of course.)

In honor of its bedsheet-and-French-tablecloth roots, I call this the Alain’s Psychedelic Breakfast dress.

Lessons learned:

• Underlining can boost the capabilities of a fashion fabric. Underlining in fairly tightly woven 100% cotton made this fabric much, much easier to work with, gave it added body, hid handstitching on the hem and facings and made it crisp and comfortable against my skin. Excellent for a semi-fitted shift. Top tip: cheat by sticking the layers together with 3M SprayMount before machine-basting them together!
• Determine the fiber content of your vintage fabric before you press. Alongside the vintage cigarette burns, this dress now also features a nice scorch mark from my iron. Whoops! Synthetic!
• Insert zippers on the flat where possible. I can’t remember whose blog gave me this handy tip, but it made all the difference — I inserted the center back zip before I began assembling the main garment pieces, and it was so much easier.
• Resist the urge to overfit. I nearly did my usual and went too far with the darts and side seam shaping. This dress is meant to be fairly straight-up-and-down.

Burda 7517

Why did I decide to sew this pattern? I can’t remember now. It’s a typical Burda design– I’ve gotten all the way through the project and still can’t make up my mind about it. Is it quirky-in-a-good-way or just plain weird?

The fabric went on a long journey before ending up as this dress. It started out as yardage in Ikea’s “Josefin” print:

I decided last fall that this fabric would be our curtains and then, in a totally and inexplicably illogical move I am slowly coming to recognize as classic Susannah, wildly overbought. By now I am sick of the sight of this print, but I’m on the ration and fabric is fabric. And I do love the idea of a dress made out of curtains.

I dunked the fabric in a bleach bath until the color changed from deep teal to pale green, then plunged it into a vinegar-and-water stop bath. Then I overdyed the fabric in Dylon Amazon Green, a color to which I’ve become strangely addicted. The result is a green that goes well with my summer tan and a print that’s toned down but still noticeable.

I hand-sewed yellow ribbon at neckline and hem while watching Cranford and drinking gin. James came home during the last episode and we took turns doing Convalescent Blonde and Soppy Regency Doctor.

When virgins get typhoid, we poo candyfloss!

Gandalf??

You’re a long way from Rome, Octavian! But I digress.

The verdict on this dress: undecided. Like many “easy” sewing patterns, it did go together quickly and fit without a fuss, but the end result kind of reflects the effort spent. It’s fine but not ravishing. Also, if you’re at all the perfectionist type it will drive you bonkers that the arty pleats shift and gape every time you move. Still, on the whole, a good throw-on-and-go wardrobe staple for warmer weather. Crisp, tidy and ladylike.

Lessons learned:

• Unless you wear a crinoline, think hard before buying 20 meters of anything. What was I thinking??
• Test your fabric to make sure unpicked stitches won’t leave needle holes. This is very tightly woven cotton and it’s difficult to steam away the traces of former seams.
• Beginning a dress “to wear in this hot weather” will instantly cause the temperature to plummet below 70°F and stay there.

After my wardrobe inventory, I purged my closet of all the irredeemable duds I hated the sight of or absolutely never wore. I also created a Please Try Harder drawer in my dresser for clothing I don’t like but have to keep until I can buy or make something nicer, because who can get by without any t-shirts? Then I set about the largest category in my wardrobe inventory: Needs Work.

Needs Work is practically ready-to-wear’s middle name. Nearly all my shop-bought garments have some tragic flaw. This blouse is all right, but the sleeves are unflattering. This skirt would be great if the hem were 2″ shorter. I would love this sweater if it were a bit more nipped in at the waist. And so on. So I’ve been revamping, reshaping, altering and generally titivating.

Accomplished so far:

• Redyeing all my black cotton. A lot of garments I’d vaguely assumed to be worn out were, on closer inspection, merely faded. I flung in a load of blacks with some Dylon Wash & Dye and hey presto! Half a dozen “new” tops in fresh-from-the-shop black.
• Shortening the hems of several vintage and me-made skirts to a more flattering length — just below the knee instead of at the widest part of the calf. This was also a great opportunity to redo hems I’d done sloppily the first time around.
• Hemming too-long jeans.
• Re-pressing crisp pleats into skirts and trousers.
• Pampering and prettifying my everyday handbag with a dose of nice leather conditioner.

Still to come:

• Darning yet more holes in my beloved Falke wool tights.
• Slicing off or reshaping bicep-squeezing puff sleeves on RTW blouses.
• Reshaping and cropping the waists of a sweater or two (sweaters that end near the natural waist seem to look better with skirts).

Contrary to my expectations, I find that mending or altering a garment makes me more attached to it rather than less. Instead of seeing a faulty garment whose imperfections have been patched up, I see something I’ve customized to my exact measurements and specifications, which feels faintly luxurious. I also feel a new bond with the garment, like working on it has given me a relationship with it that I don’t have with clothes I buy, wear and throw away. This definitely makes for a friendlier wardrobe!

I had had it in mind for years to make myself some Victorian underwear. (Hell, who hasn’t?) My new sewing machine and the interweb made it possible at last to realize that dream, and now I sleep like a true princess (or, if you want, like a Sarah Waters heroine about to be corrupted) in linen and lace.

TV 102 -- Victorian chemise

Tucks and lace. Trims from FarmhouseFabrics.com.

After I finished the chemise, however, I had a lot of yardage left over — about 10 yards, to be exact, of handkerchief linen. So, after my train of thought had been chugging idly along for a few days, I decided it might be fun to try on some Dark Ages kit. Don’t ask me how I arrived at this idea. It was late and I have broadband.

Despising the SCAdian approach (stitch up some stretch velvet, slap on some Leia buns and a circlet over your glasses and proclaim yourself Marchioness Eowyn of Thropshire), I did some heavy research, discovering to my surprise and delight that turning the clock back 1000 years would probably yield me an outfit whose comfort, warmth, fit and grace would make high-street fashion look like, well, bits of plastic stitched together by children. I decided to start from the skin out with two undertunics — the simple linen garment known by various names and worn almost universally next to the body. I made one with embroidery based on a 10th-century archaeological find, and one without.

On an impulse (I get a lot of those), I decided to dye undertunic #2 blue with indigo, which is quite authentic for the period, as the pigment is the same as that found in woad. Indigo dyeing is a fairly fiddly process (it involves keeping the vat alkaline, anaerobic and temperature-controlled, which at least sustained the Bloke’s interest), but highly rewarding, mostly for the magical moment when you lift the fabric from the dyevat greenish-yellow and watch the blue develop, Polaroid-style, as the pigment oxidizes. I was immediately hooked.

Natural indigo

The Dark Ages were brighter than you think — probably brighter than modern-day London, at least in January. People enjoyed wearing as much color as they could afford — blues, pinks, greens, purples, browns, reds, oranges. The modest sorts dyed with native plants like weld (which yields a startlingly bright yellow); the better-off used labor- and land-intensive dyes like madder (red) and woad (blue), or imported dyestuffs like kermes. (A piece of trivia: history’s really insanely wealthy, such as the Roman emperors, wore clothing dyed with Tyrian purple, a pigment extracted from the crushed shells of the mollusc Murex. A synthetic substitute, the first aniline dye, was invented in the Victorian era, sparking the mauve craze. True Tyrian purple is still one of the world’s eye-wateringly costly luxury items, weighing in at £1734 a gram, or 144 times more expensive than gold.)

There’s a fair bit of sartorial overlap between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Vikings, at least as far as foundation garments go. My undertunics will do equally well for both, depending on what I put on over them. I’m currently working on an wool overtunic, or cyrtel, suitable for a moderately well-off Saxon lady of the late 10th-early 11th century.

I bought white wool fabric on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush (London’s fabric paradise) and decided to dye it myself using madder. How complicated could it be? Well… fairly. Most home dyers are knitters who work with dainty little hanks of wool, which can be easily mordanted and dyed in a stock pot on the kitchen stove. By comparison, I was dyeing a monstrous 4-lb. swath of wool 3 yds. long by 60″ wide. I needed a lot of dyestuff, a lot of mordant and a lot of room for my fabric to move freely in the dyebath. I ransacked my brain for weeks for a way to heat 20 gallons of water to a simmer, preferably in a stainless steel container, and found myself rummaging through the online equivalent of the attic of the catering industry for steam-jacketed kettles, monster stockpots, field kitchen setups and the like. All too expensive.

Hope dawned in the form of an article by British dyer and rug-weaver Nest Rubio chronicling her experiments with cold-water madder dyeing, a method that makes much more sense when you consider all the eras in history when fuel might have been scarce and time plentiful. In the end, I bought a £10 plastic garbage bin from the pound shop around the corner and resolved to work with that.

I prepared the mordant bath at ordinary domestic hot-water temperature (about 130°F, or 55°C), added alum at 25% the weight of fabric, dropped in the wet, scoured fabric and put the lid on. Then I went to the Bloke’s parents’ for Christmas and left it there to soak.

Twelve days later, I came home, removed and rinsed the fabric and prepared the madder dyebath. I did this outside. There was a lot of madder — nearly 4 lbs. of powder — and it flew everywhere, including into my mouth (like a true cowgirl, I wasn’t wearing any kind of mask). I don’t recommend eating madder, notwithstanding the robustness of Maturin’s rats. It tastes like stevia, the New Age Nutrasweet (*shudder*). I added about 12 gallons of water from the hot tap again.

I read that bran is supposed to absorb the yellow and brown tones in madder for a purer, bluer red, so I added 1 lb. of bran tied up in cheesecloth bags. It was Fresh and Wild’s best organic wheat organic bran, so it’s bound to ensure superior results. Madder loves calcium, and London water is hard water, so I thought I’d fare quite well, but it also loves alkalinity and my tap water has a pH of between 6-7 (I have litmus strips!), so I added some baking soda to raise the pH slightly.

The dyebath frothed. Evil, sinister froth:

It looked as though I’d made a Countess Bathory-style beauty bath.

Eighteen hours later, the wool had turned a deep, fast tomato-red. Apologies for the poor image quality.

At T+ 48 hours, I removed the lid of the vat to find the fabric had floated to the surface in a soggy mass and was full of gas pockets, presumably because the madder and bran had begun to ferment.

Progging it with the BS (that’s technical dyer jargon for Big Stick) yielded satisfying blurping.

The dyebath has turned thicker and more viscous. I tested the pH today and added the barest sprinkling of lye to return it to 8, but the fabric keeps floating to the top. I’ve put my great brain to work on a Macgyver for weighing it down to keep it immersed. A large, shallow and hideous glass fruit bowl belonging to my housemate would do splendidly, but I fear it would lead to tensions. I’d better not tell them about my plans for experiments in fulling, a weatherproofing treatment for wool traditionally involving clay, stale urine and trampling the fabric in the bath with bare feet.

My housemates are lovely people, God bless ‘em, but fearfully square. This is what comes of growing up in sivilized England, where everyone’s jammed together and it’s impossible to remain unaware for long of How Things Ought to be Done, rather than in redneck America, where people have the odd broad-mindedness of peasants and mostly leave you to simmer happily for years in your own eccentricity until you come up with a new religion, a militia, a world-changing invention, a doomsday device or a new dance craze. Fortunately, England has its fair share of weirdos, albeit many self-conscious, defensive weirdos, and if you don’t mind mingling with weirdos instead of lethargic 20-somethings in skinny jeans, you can have a cracking good time. For instance, if I wanted to wear my cyrtel out of doors, I’d have plenty of places to do it. Seriously… re-enactment! Grownups who spend their weekends doing what I spent my whole childhood doing, but with better clothes and weapons and more friends! I must send a postcard to my 11-year-old self.

“Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a Viking!”

From what I can make out, Nest Rubio’s wool samples took 7 days in the dyebath to get to the shade of deep garnet I’m trying to achieve. In the meantime, I’m making the Bloke a shirt. A nice, ordinary 21st-century linen shirt, with buttons and everything.