Psychedelic 18C Waistcoat

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A new blog post?! What is this madness?!

Crazy though it may seem, it is in fact true. Today's post is going to cover something I first posted over on the 'gram back in March, and was one of the many, many things I made this year that never ended up on here.

I got this fabric back in November 2018 as part of a mega enormous prize bundle of fabric, and I knew from the get-go that I wanted to make it into an 18th Century inspired waistcoat. I'd been fixating on 18th Century tailoring for a while, and a waistcoat seemed like a much easier project to start off with than a big ol' skirted frock coat. And a very obviously non-period accurate fabric meant I wouldn't feel so obliged to stick rigidly to a historic pattern, which makes things that little bit easier when attempting to draft a pattern.

I had originally thought I'd be making this waistcoat to form part of a three-piece suit, to go with a jacket I made about a year ago (and still haven't quite finished. Damn buttonholes) and trousers I only ended up making this summer, both of which had the same print but with a red and cream colour scheme. It would have been a brilliantly, nightmarishly clashing suit, but, partly because neither the jacket nor the trousers had been completed when I started making this, I decided the waistcoat would be better off as a solo piece.

18C men's waistcoats were pretty long, so I figured I could get away using it more as a dress than actual waistcoat. I won't go into how I drafted the pattern here because I'm terrible at explaining things and didn't take any photos of the process, and I'm sure there are far better resources out there for this kind of thing anyway. I'm pretty pleased with how the pattern turned out, though. It somehow ended up a little bit too big on me - I do wish it was just a bit more nipped in at the sides as it does create quite a boxy silhouette, and it could have done with being an inch or two longer, but other than that it turned out pretty much how I wanted it to. 

In terms of sewing, it's a pretty simple construction. It's basically just two front pieces, two front facing pieces, two back pieces, and two back lining pieces. I tried to get the print roughly horizontal on each panel, but I didn't bother with any real pattern matching for this project. It has 12 buttons down the front, all of which are covered in the same fabric so that they pretty much disappear when you look from further away. I'm not the biggest fan of sewing buttonholes, so machine sewing 12 was not my idea of a fun afternoon (though now the buttonhole stitch on my machine's broken I've realised how good I had it back then...) but yeah, it was actually surprisingly easy to sew up.

I styled it with a tie-neck lace top I made a couple of years back, which helps bring out the blue in the damask print, and I thought gave an ever-so-slight nod to the cravats men would have been wearing with their waistcoats in the 1700s (but, y'know, with trousers on too, one would imagine...).

And here's what it looks like without the top!

Overall, I really like how this turned out. It's not the perfect fit, but I love how obnoxiously garish it is, and if the colours scream loud enough, everything else kinda gets drowned out anyway.