Are You Ready for Halloween (1927 version)

 

Paterson New Jersey The Morning Call, October 27, 1927, p. 13

I think I can remember the last time I dressed up for Halloween, and I'm pretty sure it was very early this century.

This ad for Butterick costume patterns appeared in a larger ad for the Quakenbush Company. The same Quackenbush Co. ad also appeared in the Passaic New Jersey Daily Herald on October 27, 1927, p. 5.

If you've waited until October 27th to start making your Halloween costume, I foresee some late nights and a costume held together mostly with basting stitches and pins.

On going through my archive, I find that I own several of these patterns

4258 - Martha Washington

4262 - Continental Suit

5522 - Dutch Costume

6282 - Cat Costume

You can see more of these patterns using the wonderful COPA database. Costume patterns tend to stay in the catalog over multiple seasons, sometimes with just the artwork updated, sometimes with changes to the pattern but retaining an old number.

Colonial Costume, No. 1087. Sizes 8 to 18. dated 1918

Witch Costume, No. 5613. Sizes 8 to 16. , dated 1924

Chinaman's Suit and Cap, No. 1049, Sizes 9 to 15., dated 1926

Santa Claus Suit, No. 6500. Sizes 34 to 46, dated 1935

Butterfly Costume, No. 3326. Sizes 6 to 18. dated 1921

Clown's Suit, No. 4048. Sizes 9 to 17. dated 1922

Bell Hop, No. 1089. Sizes 6 to 17. dated 1940

Pierrot Costume, No. 4785. Sizes 9 to 16. dated 1923

Liberty Costume, No. 5047. Sizes 8 to 17. dated 1924

Mouse Costume, No. 6174. Sizes 4 to 9., dated 1935

Reading an Apron

 

The Vermont Historical Society holds in its collections this apron. Object ID 1984.6.2 is described as

Blue checked cotton apron. The check design is woven into the fabric and is 4 yarns by 4 yarns. The apron consists of a long rectangular piece of fabric gathered into a narrow waistband that extends outward to a tie.

Additional context states that the apron is

Made from cloth woven at the Vermont State Prison in Windsor.

Aprons generally receive hard use and the plain ones don't often survive, so this apron and its context are interesting.

The description of "The check design is woven into the fabric and is 4 yarns by 4 yarns" we would generally refer to today as gingham. However, since gingham used to be woven in either stripes and checks, this fabric is most accurately called an apron check.

Instructions for weaving this exact apron check appear on page 29 of The Domestic Manufacturer's Assistant and Family Directory in the Arts of Weaving and Dyeing, by J & R Bronson, published in Utica New York in 1817.

The Vermont Historical listing doesn't include any measurements, but I suspect the apron is a single 3/4 yard wide loom width - 27 inches - as the Bronson instructions indicate. From the photo, I'd guess that the apron was made from a length of fabric a yard to 1 1/4 yards long (36" to 40 1/2",) with the ties being cut from the width.

Visible stains on the apron would indicate it has seen some use. The photo doesn't have the resolution to determine if the apron has been patched or darned, but there do seem to be a few areas that might be small holes, perhaps caused by sparks.

Just three years after the prison was built in 1809, they advertised their ginghams in the Vermont Republican and Journal on December 14, 1812. They sold not only ginghams, but shirtings and bed tickings, both wholesale and retail, and would take payment in produce, no doubt used to help feed the prisoners.

On June 28, 1813, the prison touted improvements to their weaving operation in an article published on page 3 The Washingtonian

Let's do some math. Convict S.G. was weaving a little over 3 3/4 yards per hour. This is a respectable speed. The writer's mention of the "great improvements" made in weaving machinery suggests that the loom was fitted with a flying shuttle.

In weaving, the weft, or filling threads, are laid down one at a time by the weaver passing a shuttle back and forth. (This is called throwing, but it's really a controlled, sharp push.) To overcome the limitations of the human arm-span, two weavers needed to work together to produce broadcloth, a huge industry in England.

The flying shuttle, patented in 1733 by John Kay, mechanized the throwing action so that one person could weave widths of fabric greater than their arm-span. But the invention was also found to be simply faster than throwing the shuttle by hand for narrower widths as well.  S.G. was weaving 112 weft threads (these are called shots or picks) per minute, slightly less than two shots per second, a very speedy rate.

The mention of three shuttles is a head-scratcher.  Weaving the apron check would require two shuttles, one for blue, one for white. Using two shuttles requires an additional mechanism on the flying shuttle to allow the weaver to change colors without having to handle the shuttles. But that's still only two shuttles.

Knowing both how many yards were woven and how many shots were woven allows us to determine that the fabric had about 48 weft ends per inch. The number of warp ends would be about the same. It would be interesting to know the thread counts of the apron in the Historical Society's collection.

The warp yarns may have been a twisted two-ply for additional strength, while the weft (filling) was single, similar to these yarns offered for sale in the New York Evening post on Monday, March 16, 1818.

The article indicates that there was an additional task of sizing the yarn - applying a thin liquid substance to the warp yarn strengthen it by minimizing fraying.  Only the warp yarn would be sized.  Starting on page 32 of their book, the Bronsons give detailed instructions for sizing cotton yarn, using a thin solution of wheat flour. 

While the flying shuttle was necessary for convict S.G. to achieve the speeds they did, the ability to weave cotton goods relatively cheaply relied on three additional innovations; the spinning frame patented by Richard Arkwright in England 1769, using water to power the frame, which started at Slater Mill in Rhode Island in 1793, and Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794. (1)

As the quantity of machine-spun cotton yarn increased, bringing down the price, and as refinements were made to looms, weaving as a prison trade would have become more economically feasible. The prison would have had the expense of acquiring the looms (2) and the associated equipment and the yarns. It also appears that they paid a master weaver, probably to teach inmates how to weave, to keep an eye on quality control, to keep the equipment in good order, and to manage supplies. (3)

This newspaper ad from the Vermont Republican and Journal Windham, Windsor and Orange County Advertiser from January 28th 1822 would seem to indicate that the prison was doing their own indigo dyeing, a process the Bronsons also detail in their book.

Note that the prison also had a side business of making reeds for looms as well as shuttles. The shuttles produced in the prison were very likely similar to the ones below. These shuttles would be used in homes where the shuttle was still being thrown by hand. None of these shuttles has any documentation, but the top one was purchased in Vermont.

The development of the power loom in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1814 would eventually spell the end of prison weaving. The last newspaper reference I've found for prison ginghams is from an ad on December 29th, 1832, on page 1 of the Vermont Republican and Journal, when the prison superintendent asked those owing amounts to the prison to make their payments (so that the prison could close their books at the end of the year.) The mention of "very reduced prices" may indicate a plan to close down the weaving business.

Here's a lovely demonstration of a flying shuttle loom, by somebody you may recognize, one way or another.

Notes

(1) If you're not familiar with John Styles's work you have a great treat ahead of you. You can find many of his papers here. His paper on the rise and fall of the spinning jenny is helpful in this context. It's possible that the prison had a jenny to prepare their own yarns.

(2) Research into the looms of this period is ongoing, but largely handlooms were one-offs and could be made by just about anybody with a good grasp of timber framing techniques - perhaps even by inmates at the prison. Beaters (called "Lathes" at this time) using flying shuttles would require a little more skill. Perhaps Ebenezer Stowell in Middlebury Vermont was able to supply the prison. He advertised on page 4 of the Vermont Mirror on August 24, 1814.

(3) The Vermont Journal, Monday, November 1, 1819, p. 2. The master weaver's wages are summarized with those of the Keeper, Assistant Keeper, and Guards, so we don't know exactly what they were being paid. From this article we also learn that 115 prisoners were employed. Not all of them would have been weaving.

Hargrove No. III - A Plain Cord

 

After far too many delays, I finally finished weaving a sample of Hargroves' No. III, A Plain Cord.

For those of you not familiar, John Hargrove had a book of weavers' pattern drafts published in Baltimore in 1792. Only two copies are known to survive, and fortunately you can see read one on the Internet Archive.  A reprint was published by The American Antiquarian Society in 1979. Unfortunately, like the original book, the reprint is incredibly scarce. If you can find a copy - perhaps through interlibrary loan - Rita Adrosko's Introduction is very informative.

I like rib weaves and I think they don't get as much attention from handweavers as they deserve. I'd not woven this particular Hargrove draft before and I decided to try it using a yarn I'd not used before.

This 20/4 unmercerized cotton was a mill end I bought in 1991 and tucked away in my stash. Rib weaves have a history of being used for work clothes and this cotton seemed like a good candidate for a fabric for a vest or trousers I could make up for gardening wear.

Nominally, this yarn is equivalent to a 10/2 at 4,200 yards per pound, which I typically weave at about 24 epi for tabby. To get a sturdy fabric in a rib weave, I sleyed a little closer, at 30 epi, which is conveniently five repeats of the draft per inch. I wove my sample 8" wide.

To maintain a walking tread, the Hargrove draft adds a fifth treadle. As I don't have a fifth treadle at my disposal at the moment, I had to fudge the tread a bit. I tied up the shafts in order (shaft 1 to treadle 1, etc.)

This meant that tabby is woven by alternately treading 1&2 and 3&4. After each shot of tabby, the two warp-wise floats are treadled on 2 and 3. Starting the weft on the left side, then starting the treadling on 1&2 meant that I always knew which tabby to treadle next.

The yarn behaved well, being just slightly tender at the selvedges - probably because I wasn't using a temple and the fabric drew in quite a bit. Here's a close-up under tension on the loom.

Here, I've used a pink mercerized 10/2 for the weft so that the weave structure is more apparent.

Here's the back of the fabric, also under tension.

After taking the fabric off the loom I sank it into a tub of boiling water to which I'd beat in a good handful of soap flakes. I let this sit overnight, then rinsed in warm water until the water ran clear. The 20/4 cotton bloomed quite nicely and while the hand is firm, it's not unduly stiff. It finished at 40 epi.

Probably

 

Over the years I've developed a fairly ruthless approach to starting perennials. In late autumn I sow seed in flats, cover the flats with 1/4" hardware cloth to keep squirrels and jays from digging in them, and leave them outside to experience their first Pacific Northwest winter. If they survive the wet, the chill, and the occasional ice storm, they germinate sometime in the spring. Unfortunately, so do any weed seeds that managed to drift in.

I know what a lot of perennial seedlings look like, and for things that are new to me I have some good books to help me out. But every once in a while I'm just completely stymied. So I think I've just pricked out seedlings for a dozen pots of Shooting Star, but I'm not entirely certain.

Time will certainly tell.

Dressing Sensibly

Right. So you've put away your dressy holiday clothes, except for the ones that need to go to the dry cleaner due to some course of action you can't quite recall but are pretty sure your friends will rib you about for years to come.

It's time to return to Dressing Sensibly for the Weather in the Northern Hemisphere.  It's time for a nice...LADIES' UNDER VEST.

In 1884 you could subscribe to The National Garment Cutter and use their graded rulers and curved ruler to draft up this practical garment.*

As somebody whose stay-at-home dressing during the winter months used to start with a base layer of Duofold long underwear, I appreciate this garment.

For winter wear, the vest would typically be made of white or natural colored wool flannel (about the weight used in lighter weight Pendleton flannel shirts.) Due to its bulk, sewing with flannel historically used some specific techniques, such as using a herringbone stitch to fix down the seam allowances.

Binding the raw edges would produce a tidier, but more time-consuming finish.

Then there are those 17 button holes.

If you've got a little time on your hands, you could embroider scallops around the neckline.

 And then finish it all off with a some pretty feather stitching.

All illustrations showing techniques are taken from this excellent source. Used copies are a little hard to find in the United States, but it's available on the Internet Archive.

* You can use this draft! It's based on a scaled units in which for a 32" bust, 1 unit = 1". For every bust measurement inch over 32, increase the unit by 1/16th of an inch.  That is, for a 36" bust, 1 unit on the draft = 1 1/4". So, for the 1 1/2 units down from the top, you'd measure down 1 7/8." You'll also want a french curve ruler so that you don't have to draw the curved lines freehand.

Bear in mind that the vest would have been worn over a chemise and then a corset that molded the body to the fashionable shape for the period, so the proportions may need to be adjusted for the modern female body.

Personally I'd be tempted to mix and match time periods and make this up in a grunge-era plaid flannel with embroidery in an eye-watering magenta or neon lime green.

A little distraction was needed

 

When I was a kid I was fascinated by antique dolls. Theirs was the first display case I'd gravitate to in any museum or historical society.

I would trace my enduring interest in old clothes to the clothes worn by the dolls, from professionally produced trousseaux to the best efforts of little girls learning to sew.

One year for my birthday I was given a kit for a 14" tall reproduction china doll and her clothes. 

This is a few years earlier than Mark Farmer the kit I was given

These dolls have china heads, lower arms, and lower legs attached to cloth bodies. As I recall, the doll itself went together easily. I also recall that I made her a dress in a blue and yellow cotton-poly floral print with an edging of polyester machine pleated lace. I think I knew even then that it was dreadfully ugly.

At some point in the multiple moves my family and I made through the years, the doll got separated from her clothes and the clothes disappeared, so she's spent the last couple of decades wrapped in blanket in the dolls' carriage, wearing only a pair of drawers.  The teddies and the other dolls were very polite about it.

This month I needed a project to distract me from the world, so I decided to take my doll in hand and give her some new clothes.

For sewing the longer seams, my treadle machine is the best tool for the job. It does a 1/8" seam better than any electric machine I've ever owned.

This Singer 201K treadle machine was manufactured in 1945. I made the cat-deterring cover from a cardboard box and some fabric scraps

But mostly it was hand-sewing, which I find restful as long as I can get enough light, so I typically worked only during the day. Some days I needed to use a magnifier, some days I didn't.

A very plain chemise

Hand sewn hem

The doll's china shoulders add a lot of bulk, giving the clothes rather odd proportions. Imagine designing clothing for somebody who would wear it over a football player's shoulder pads.

A petticoat

Part of the fun of a project like this is to use only materials that one has on hand. The fabric for the dress is from scraps I saved from the early1980s. When I bought this fabric, small cities still had locally owned department stores, and these department stores had sewing departments, though these would disappear just a few years later.

I adored this fabric. I used it to make the Folkwear Prairie Dress and wore it to shreds.

The fabric was made by Cranston Print Works, an old, old New England firm that produced high quality cotton prints for over 150 years before closing in 2009. I still miss them.

Note how similar the Cranston print (on the right) is to the Three Cats fabric (on the left) produced several decades later and based on 19th century printing plates.

It being the chilly season, I thought the doll might like a little extra warmth. Sweaters were impractical for ladies during the nineteenth century when their clothes frequently had very large sleeves. This led to the development of close-fitting knitted garments, not quite shawls, not quite waistcoats, and with names such as hug-me-tight, bosom friend, and sontag.

I finished sewing on the last bit of ribbon the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day. The doll (who has never had a name) is now back in the dolls' carriage, where the teddies are getting just a little bit tired of hearing her brag that she has new clothes and they don't. 

Placemats in the Style of Venetian Carpet

 

Venetian Carpet was a type of warp-faced flat-woven carpet popular in the early nineteenth century into the early twentieth century.

Textile names are always tricky. Sometimes they truly do identify where the textile originated from - or where a canny merchant wanted his customers to believe they came from. Names change over time; spelling, translation, or pronunciation errors creep in. Florence Montgomery's book Textiles in America is the best resource if you're interested in American textiles between 1650 and 1750 and have a burning desire to know the difference between say, ducape and duroy.

Venetian carpeting most certainly did not come from Venice. We know it was woven in the United States because we have instructions for it in the pattern book of Silas Burton (1775 - 1827) a weaver who lived and worked in Connecticut. The earliest draft (pattern, or recipe for weaving) in his book is dated 1793. 

Burton refers to his carpets variously as "striped carpeting," "rainbow carpeting," and "shaded striped carpeting," but in at least one instance he does refer to a carpet as "of the Venetian figure."

In all cases, as his drafts make clear, these carpets are composed of stripes. In many cases the stripes include shaded hues, often of red or green. Many of them also featured a "picket fence" effect, achieved by alternating single warp threads in two colors - black and yellow being a very common combination.

In 1804, Andrew S. Norwood was selling Venetian carpeting in his New York City store in full yard widths ("4-4") as well as a 27" width ("3-4" or three quarters of yard) that was suitable for stairs. Stair carpeting seems to have been a common use of Venetian carpet. Lengths could also be sewn together to provide a room-sized rug.

The Evening Post, New York, New York, December 17, 1804, p. 2

During the dreary grey days of late winter I decided that I was getting tired of my placemats, some of which are easily 15 years old, and that it would be cheering to weave some replacements, and also that it would be fun to weave these in the style of Venetian carpets.

However, what with one thing and another, it was the end of May before I was finally ready to dress the loom.

The 13 1/2" wide warp, carefully controlled by the cross and the lease sticks, ready for drawing in.

Each of the 812 ends (threads) is drawn through the correct heddle eye using a special hook.

All drawn in!

The ribbed effect is achieved by using a main weft (crosswise threads) that is eight times thicker than the warp. To reduce bulk at the hems, the ends of each placemat are woven with yarn that's the same thickness as the warp.

I use a loom that probably dates to the early 19th century. Missing parts - the lighter colored wood - were replaced with oak that was originally intended for a wooden boat keel.

Because these early looms are so massive, their weight does the hard work of beating in the weft so the weaver doesn't have to work as hard.

The end is near!

I finished weaving last week and started hemming placemats this week. I used two different colors for the main warp - green, or white. At first I thought I preferred the green warp, but I like the way the white warp forms a sort of picot effect along the sides.

At any rate, I can confirm that having one's boiled egg, toast, and tea in the morning is much cheerier now.

Finally, I have a theory about the "Venetian" moniker. Stripes of bright colors is a pretty good description of venetian glass, particularly of the canes that are cut to make beads.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, May 31, 1823, p. 2

Venetian glass beads from bead paradise web site