Combination Underwear is Fantastic!

Whew!  I finally completed a concrete accomplishment!  After all the planning and 'research' (flipping though books and websites looking at pretty dresses), I actually have something checked off my list!

Dressing Step 1:  Combination Underwear!
Cinderella's not ready for the ball yet, but at least she isn't naked!

I've seen a couple different years given on this Harper's Bazaar image, but safe to say it's from the right time period.  The idea is to combine a few different layers of undergarments into one uber-garment.  That way, the amount of bulk is reduced, while all the functionality remains.  My dress will be form-fitting, so I don't want a lot of layers shifting around underneath to worry about.

I was able to borrow a copy of Truly Victorian's TV105 pattern--sans directions.  Somewhere along the route, the directions got separated from the pattern pieces.  I had hoped they might turn up in another envelope, but so far, no luck.  Oh well, I have all the right shapes so this should be easy!  Not too complicated, I bet I can whip this out in a day!

Not quite.  Turns out a pattern with no directions or detail pictures is quite an interesting challenge when it is a garment I've never seen in person, nor have found many pictures of that show construction details.  So I decided not to worry about what would have been the historically accurate sewing method and just to be happy with a functional garment.

I also had to debate what exactly I wanted out of this underwear.  Would it be all lace and ribbons?  A pretty, special occasion garment to coordinate with the corset and dress?  Oh, but wait, I don't even know what fabric I'm going to use for the corset, let alone the colors.  I haven't located fabric for the dress either, so I don't even know what I'll be matching.  And the kicker:  I started this the day before Thanksgiving.  The only fabric I had on hand that would come even close to working was the last of a bolt of plain white cotton.  Any additional fabric and notions would have to be purchased--on Thanksgiving?  Nothing's open.  The day after Thanksgiving then--ARGH!!  That's Black Friday.  I avoid Black Friday like it's the Black Plague.  Oh, right, and I forgot that I'm broke and going to be buying Christmas presents.

New game plan:  I will make a 'cellular combination', meaning that it is constructed of natural plant-based fiber fabric:  the cotton I have on hand.  That part is historically accurate.  Sure, this dress would have probably warranted some fine muslin at least, if not some lovely silk, etc., but I have justified the rather plain design with this argument:  when I go dancing, I will wear the ugliest undergarments in the interest of comfort and overall look of the dress.  I don't wear anything that might make my dancing experience less fun, nor do I want weird looking rumples on my dress from unnecessary bows and lace poking around.  So if the me in 2013 will wear functional but boring underwear, then I will choose the same for my late 1880s/early 1890s alter ego.

This means I need to choose a historic figure who would follow the same thought process of 'function over form'.  That may help me narrow down the field a bit as I am still completely undecided.

My other argument is that this will be used for quite a few different costumes, including a number of my dresses that would have been before the combination underwear was in use, but hey, I am excited about how functional this garment turned out to be!  Especially the upside-down sleeve design to protect my dress from any perspiration.  I plan to wash my combination often, which led me to the next design choice.

I machine sewed pretty much everything.  I am following the rule 'hand sew if it will show'.  Sadly, I haven't the time, patience, nor expertise to make everything by hand, and the sewing machine was at least in use by this time in history.  None of my underwear should be showing, so there's no pretty hand-sewing.  I did French seams for most of it, with every single seam finished--no raw edges anywhere in this baby!  I want to machine wash, so that's my best chance to keep it from falling apart.  Although the machine-sewn button holes are not going to hold up as well as if I had hand-sewn them, fifteen button holes was just more than I had the time and patience for.  The coup de grace is the plastic buttons.  The plastic buttons that almost match.  Ten of the fifteen are the same, with a group of five rounding out the crew (the pattern picture showed only ten, but my buttons were a bit on the small side and I didn't want to end up with them spaced too far apart).  I'm not going to be parading about in these underwear, so I'm going to hope that the goddesses of historic costuming forgive me on this one.

All complete, and it even survived a maiden voyage through machine washing and drying!

For everyone who asks how you go to the bathroom:  yep, it's really quite easy!  The legs are completely separated.
The sleeves wanted to fall off my shoulders, so I ended up adding a box pleat along the back.  I decided to just let the fullness spread from there so I wouldn't lose mobility.  We'll see if I need to control that with more of a dart or something later once I have the corset finished.  If I ever make another combination, I think I will draft it from my body block so the bodice fits better--apparently I have some weird shoulder/armscye business going on.

Sleeves are hard enough for me to figure out--I always have to double, triple, and quadruple check before I sew them on, and still sometimes make mistakes.  Sewing this one, where the design is essentially an upside-down cap sleeve, set in with a French seam, just about exploded my brain.  

In the end, I decided that I rather liked the streamline look to these underwear.  Although I began with more of a frothy lacy be-ribboned image in my head, I am enjoying the simplicity of what I ended up making.  The straightforward cellular combination is my new favorite thing.