Painting Shoes, Socks, and Sewing a Chemise

 

This Saturday gone I had a historical dress picnic with my friends, where I wore my finished 18th century outfit. I'm still waiting on some photos my friends took before I can finish putting together the blog about it. In the mean time I thought I'd share another showing you some of the things I DIY'd for my look~

The first thing I made for my 18th century wardrobe is a chemise/shift. I thought that would be a fairly easy thing to make for myself plus it just made more sense than paying like £80+ for a very plain undergarment when I could use that money for something more visible. I bought a bedsheet off ebay and followed this tutorial as well as this one which expands upon the first, though I did shorten the shift so it stopped below the knee (it ended up being a little shorter than that though I think, oops). I decided not to show you a step by step as it's no different from any other tutorial, plus I'm not really in a place to be telling anyone how to do this when I'm such a beginner. Here's a photo I took before I'd cut the neck hole, I was using the stays to help guide where I should cut it.

I didn't get a proper photo of me wearing the finished shift on its own, but here's some stills from a video I took with the stays on top. It's not perfect, but it does the job. I definitely need to shorten the sleeves in the future. You can see I'm also wearing the shoes and stockings I talk about below~

So my original plan for footwear was to DIY two pairs of shoes I'd found in charity shops by covering them in fabric and adding embellishments. I still plan on doing that, however I was not going to be able to finish them in time for the picnic with my friends, so I decided to buy a pair of shoes from Rumbelinas on Etsy. They sell the most affordable 18th century reproduction footwear I've seen, and they seem very high quality.

I didn't want to have plain shoes as pretty much all the museum pieces I've seen are adorned in lovely patterns or embellishments, and tbh plain shoes just aren't fancy enough. I decided I would paint a floral design on the front, so I looked at all the photos of 18th century women's shoes I could find for inspiration. It became pretty clear that, at least from what I saw (I could be wrong), that shoes tended to be covered in a fabric, either silk or something with a woven design, so technically painting onto the leather might not be historically accurate but I'm okay with that. 

Eventually I settled on copying this lovely embroidered design on these shoes. I also swapped out the leather laces for a pink ribbon and added a sheet of sole grip to the bottom. Below is the final result. I'm really happy with how it turned out! Should I paint more, perhaps on the side or along the edges? Please let me know~

I also painted myself a pair of clocked stockings. The design is absolutely not perfect but I wanted to give it a go. I was originally going to try embroidering them but I very quickly realised that would not be happening haha. I think I'll just stick to buying stockings tbh. But they'll mostly be hidden so it doesn't matter too much.

On a somewhat related note, I would really appreciate if anyone could direct me to sources that clearly go into detail about the timeline of 18th century fashion. I know the general trends, such as stomachers becoming less popular later into the century (only learnt this one recently), and hair getting bigger as the century goes on and then becoming the hedgehog style, but I would like to know a bit more specifically. I've only found sources that are more general atm but I feel like there's a lot I still don't know and I'd love to learn!