Simplicity 8881 – Elizabethan Dress (+ Hoop Skirt! + Bustle!)

For Halloween, I wanted to show you the most elaborate thing I have ever been involved in making. I use the word “involved” pretty loosely, because I was 14 and my mum pretty much did everything, in my recollection. I was in Scouts, and there is a yearly camp that involves live action role-playing (LARP-ing) in teams, travelling around and fighting creatures and trading items and gaining hit points, defence points, and ultimately fighting a dragon. And everyone gets really into it and makes costumes and creates characters and it’s great. One year, I decided I wanted to up the ante on my costume, and picked out Simplicity 8881 (now out of print, but you can find it on Etsy!). Mum and I were going to make it together, and set off on our sewing journey blissfully unaware of how much we were biting off.

Yup. Hoop skirt from scratch. Bustle from scratch. Under skirt and over skirt and separate bodice with built-in fully boned corset. Let me regale you with the supplies needed for this insane thing.

• 7 7/8 yards overskirt/sleeves
• 3/4 yard bodice
• 1 3/8 yards bodice lining
• 3 3/8 yards underskirt sides and back
• 5 1/8 yards farthingale and bum roll (hoop skirt and bustle)
• 1 1/8 yards over-sleeve and partlet
• 1 3/8 yards underskirt front panel
• 5/8 yard netting for upper sleeve
• 18 7/8 yards twill tape
• 3 1/4 yards grosgrain ribbon (two different widths)
• 8 yards of 3/8″-wide featherweight boning
• 24 7/8 yards of 1/2″-wide steel hoop boning
• 20 5/8  yards of metallic braid trim for sleeves
• 3 3/4 yards of trim for the overskirt
• 6 1/4 yards of wide lace for the overskirt
• 3 1/4 yards cord for corset lacing

PHEW. In retrospect, I don’t understand how this insane list of supplies didn’t make my mum say “NO WAY”. I think we must have gotten loads of it on sale, because my mum said today that she doesn’t recall it being exorbitantly expensive. I do remember that we had to order the boning for the hoops online, which felt like witchcraft back then (2004). It came from the US, and I felt very worldly receiving a package that we’d ordered on the INTERNET.

You have to make the hoop skirt and bustle first so that you can adjust the length of the skirt over the hoop skirt. Otherwise you’re just taking a total stab in the dark and trying to suss out how much the hoops will raise the skirt off the ground. We just used muslin for the undergarments, since it wouldn’t be seen. When I was actually at camp, I ended up having to pin up the hoops by one hoop so that it would stop dragging in the mud. Yup. We made this beautiful thing and then I dragged it through the mud. KIDS THESE DAYS. You actually just sew the twill tape into strips at tiers on the skirt to slide the boning through, and you even leave the ends open so that you can take the hoops out for storage. In theory. This thing has been stored using the highly couture method of looping a big length of twist tie through one side of it and tying a bow and then sticking it along the wall in the back of the downstairs closet that no one goes into.

 

After you finish the undergarments, you move on to the skirt. The underskirt has a pretty panel at the front, but Simplicity was very sensible and thought of the expense/weight of having that fabric all the way around without it being seen and opted not to. So the remainder of the underskirt is a lining fabric in a similar colour, which you can see in one of the detail photos below. The outer skirt has 8m-ish of fabric in it, all tightly gathered, plus a lace detail along each side of the front. There’s a facing flipped under along the front edge so it hides the stitching of the lace. I’m pretty sure it’s hand sewn down (THANK YOU MUM), and then there’s another layer of trim down the center of it. The skirt is a giant rectangle, I think, so the front edge is just straight on the grain. The gathers of the skirt are so heavy that “we” used tiny little beads to anchor the gathering threads on the skirt, which you can see below. And then my mum sewed the most invisible and perfect blind hem along the entire bottom of the outer skirt. Honestly. How did she not say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH on this whole thing?! There are giant snaps along the top edge of the skirt which theoretically anchor the bodice to it. Even when I was 14-15, we had issues with the weight of the skirt being too much for the bustle to keep it high enough to have secure snapping, which you can see is still the case. Hello, Megan’s lower back.

Next up, the bodice! It was very structured and had channels for the boning, as you can see below. We used elastic cording to lace up the back in a stroke of genius, so that it would be more comfortable and flexible for traipsing around in the woods and slaying dragons. The sleeves have trim sewn on them in a grid pattern, and then the upper sleeves have the same trim but it’s only anchored at the top and bottom of the poofy sections. My mum remembers the grommets on the back giving us a lot of trouble, because we’d never done that before and YouTube was not really a thing to give us assistance in figuring it out, so all we had to go on was the instructions on the package. Which, if you’ve ever looked at, are not that detailed. But we managed! It’s funny looking back because I don’t mind grommets at all now, but I think it was just one thing in the long list of detailed things we had to do on this dress. There was a gaping/falling-off-the-shoulders issue with this that only became apparent once the bodice was finished, so we just tucked it in and hand sewed it down, which you can see below in the last picture based on the lines of the binding/piping in blue.          There was supposed to be a neck insert as you can see in the photos on the pattern envelope, but we decided against that from the get-go, as I thought it would be too constricting and itchy. Et voila! One of my close friends was involved in the costumes for her high school’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (my high school eventually, but I was still in grade 8 or 9) and I loaned her the dress for that. The director loved it so much that he REWROTE the ending of Twelfth Night so that Viola can appear for the final scene in a dress instead of dressed as a man, and featured my dress as the grand finale outfit. When I eventually met him in grade 10 while doing the music for a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, he was flabbergasted to know that my mum and I were the ones who had made the dress. And now it hangs out in my downstairs closet, occasionally stumbled across. It was really interesting to pull it out this time and take a closer look now that I’ve been sewing seriously for a few years, because I have a much greater appreciation for the amount of work that went into it. What were we thinking?!