Making the 1830s Collar

As you can see I left this pretty late into the project as when I was first cutting the 1830s bodice I hadn't done much cutting before and felt I wanted to leave the collar (which looked very complex) till later when I was more comfortable and confident with working on the stand. I also wannted to uderstande Janet Arnold's patterns more before I tried to scale this piece up. However when it came to actually cutting and putting it together it just seemed to work and fit. I had a little help from Dexter as to figure out which bit went to which bit and where but when I just started to cut and move the fabric around it all fitted together.

I stuffed the sleeve with tissue paper almost to its maximum size because if I made it into a real garment I would ensure the sleeve stayed out this big by adding more support to it therefore I needed to cut the collar to the size the sleeve should be at its biggest so if I did transefer it to top fabric the collar would be the correct size.

Dexter suggested I draw it out to the scale that was in Janet Arnold but as I did this I gained a better understanding of which bit fitted where so was able to extend and change pieces as to fit my bodice. Using the back and front panel patterns was also useful when tring to get the shape of the neckline.

I had problems with where the gathers met the rest of the fabric as it kept rooshing and creating pleates where I didn't want any so to fix it I would put a couple of gathers in the top of the shoulder seam but this didn't work very well and also didn't match the pattern I was working from so in the end the best thing was to get rid of as much excess seam allowence around the area by binding on edge and hand sewing the gathers to it. One thing I missed was the fact the gathered edge should have had a bit of seam allowence to turn over so it was a neat edge before I hand sew it to the the binding. Actually, the gathers and binding are surposed to be pipped together however I did not read this until I had sewn it as was in a hurry to get it done before the deadline, yet again its more about the cut rather than anything else and I feel the collar looks good.

The shape of the bottom of the collar looked really good before I bagged it out but with a bit of pressing it should look neat and tidy again. I feel the collar really compleates the bodice and makes it very classic of the 1830s which is why I chose this toile.

Where the collar kept catching -

Shape of front of the collar -

Shape of back of the collar -