Saturday 24th September: Victory!

Ah-ha! I do believe I have gained victory over the farthingale!!! I have been very disheartened about my farthingale for a long time, but I pulled it out this morning to put it on dolly and see if I could make any headway. The problem has been this: my farthingale was made from the Algeca pattern (ie. a rectangular front and back panel and two triangular gores either side) and stiffened with hemp rope. So in someways I suppose it is more a corded petticoat than a true farthingale. However, it did not behave at all well. The skirt settled into wibbles all round, sticking out in points at the CF, and right and left sides, and caving in at the back. I've taken some photos in an attempt to explain all the wierd things this garments did. The red cloth doesn't photgraph well, but you can get an idea of the chaos this skirt created.

So my farthingale and I had harsh words and haven't spoken for the last six months or so. I consulted a friend of a friend who teaches costuming and he really said my only hope was steels. I was still sort of keen to keep by rope, though. It's about 3/8th of an inch diameter and had prooved it had enough oomph to hold the skirt out...in all the wrong places.

I've had this feeling that it might be possible to correct the problem by adjusting the chanels and the rope at certain points, and now, with the assistance of dolly, I could!

I ended up unpicking portions of each channel where the rope was joined and pulling the ends of the rope out so that I could pull and adjust them. I bunched the cloth up in the two backward facing triangle gores and...it seems to work. The shape is perhaps not perfect, but it means that I didn't have to take the whole thing apart and try again.

I'm now in the process of adding the waistband. And there are still ropes sticking out all over it, so they'll have to be dealt with too.