Fabrics, Part 2

It may come as a disappointment to discover that some historical fabrics are no longer available today. What we call muslin is a vastly different thing from Regency muslin. That was a fine and elegant cotton fabric, suitable for day dresses, and sometimes woven with "sprigs," as was illustrated on the cover of an excellent romance by Georgette Heyer.

Muslin nowadays, at least in the USA, is nowhere near the lovely, delicate fabric that made such dainty dresses. In order to get the same look, you'll need to substitute similar fabrics. Cotton gauze or a fine batiste will give much the same effect. Silk muslin or mousseline is still in use, but has a stiffer weave. You can also use lightweight printed cottons to much the same effect.

The movie versions of Jane Austen's novels had such a problem, which they solved admirably. Note the similarity between the actual printed cotton fabrics in the Museum of Costume in Bath, UK, to the costumes used by the BBC. Polly Maberley wore the yellow printed dress as Kitty Bennett in the 1995 BBC television production of Pride and Prejudice. Note how similar it is to the actual period dresses show just behind it. For more information, be sure to visit the Museum of Costume website. (Link above.)

1871 Parisian Mourning Dress
Surrender Dorothy has this
page from a fashion magazine
offered on their page.

Another fabric you may have difficulty finding is bombazine. (Also spelled bombasine.) This was a heavy silk and woolen blended twill, with a silk warp and worsted woof. Black and dark blue were the most typical colors, and it was used most often for mourning garments, especially in the Victorian Era.

TextureImages.net shows this incredible photo, giving an idea of just how firm a fabric you'll need as a substitute. While jean can be suitably heavy, it won't have the slight sheen the silk gives. You can use a woolen twill, or search for a heavy silk twill.
While searching for bombazine online, I came across Thistle Hill Weavers. They don't offer bombazine currently, but they do work with the fibers that go into it, and they take custom orders. It would be expensive, but if you absolutely must be completely authentic, you could request a custom order.

Whatever you decide in creating your costume, enjoy the process. Finding the right pattern, fabric and trims is half the fun!

Happy Sewing!

Fabrics, Part 1

The very earliest "fabrics" were skins and furs. I'll write more on those later, as the methods of their preparation is vastly different from other fabrics.

The fabrics of first handmade manufacture are the woolens and linens, so ancient that they are mentioned in the Bible. Cotton cultivation came later, along with silk, which, due to the difficulty of obtaining it during the Middle Ages, became very popular among the royal, noble and wealthy merchant classes of Europe.

Wool is sheared from living animals, especially sheep, goats (cashmere), camelids (camel, alpaca, llama, etc.), and musk oxen (quiviut). Primarily, however, the term "wool" refers to fibers sheared from sheep. (See below for a discussion of the "other" wools.) Sheep's wool is easily dyed, another plus. One of the earliest methods of forming fabric from wool is felting, where the wool is washed in hot water with some sort of soap and then rubbed by hand until the fibers mat together. Modern methods achieve this with machines, but you can still make your own felt today, either by using wool fabric or natural wool fibers.

Linen is made by gathering the stems of the flax plant, then soaking them until they swell. The process is called retting. Once the fibers are free of the outer stalk, they can be dried and woven. No good modern method of creating linen has been successfully developed, which is one reason why linen is so expensive.

Cotton is another ancient fabric, which, unlike linen, was made both in the Old World and the New. Harvesting used to be a time-consuming process, as did removing the seeds from the fluffy fibers of the pod. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, to remove the seeds by machine, greatly simplified the process, reducing the cost in the 19th Century.

Silk, according to legend, was discovered when a silkworm cocoon dropped into the teacup of a Chinese princess. If true, she must have been amazed at the long, lustrous, single thread she was able to unwind from cocoon. History records that the Empress Si-Ling-Chi was raising silkworms by 2640 BC. The only insect-produced fiber has many different variations in the weaves, one of the most popular of which is silk satin.

Ramie is another natural fiber, sometimes called China grass. It behaves somewhat like linen. Nowadays, it's often blended with other fibers, notably cotton and silk.

The "other" wools come from a variety of fur- or wool-bearing animals. Goats give us mohair and cashmere. Camel hair comes from (of course) camels. Other members of the camel family provide alpaca, llama, guanaco, huarizo and misti (crosses between alpaca and llama, the camelid versions of a mule and a hinny), and vicuña. Angora comes from angora rabbits, which are clipped just like sheep, only much more frequently. (No harm comes to the angora rabbits!) Quiviut is taken from the soft underwool of musk oxen.

Depending on your costume time period, you may choose one or more of the fabrics made from these fibers. In a future post, I'll also discuss historic fabric blends (such as linsey-woolsey). In the meantime, while you're doing your research, I recommend the following books:
Claire Shaeffer's Fabric Sewing Guide
Fabric Science, Fifth Edition
A History of Costume