Insects

The theme has been annouced! Insects.
My initial thoughts were filled with beetlewings and oily iridescent materials. However I have had time to think it over and my second idea is something different.

These are some of a set of satirical cartoons from the Victorian era entitled "Punches Designs After Nature" which were illustrated by Edward Linley Sambourn for the magazine Punch.
Linley worked as a cartoonist for the magazine between 1844 and 1910, so his cartoons cover a wide date range. The 'designs after nature' lampoon the popular fashions of the time, and are both cutting and adorable in retrospect.
The reason my mind turned to this is because one of my favourite examples of these is the wasp - a cartoon which dates to October 1869. The 1869 editions of Punch are available at archive.org  - click the link for a link to see this particular issue. It's quite far through, but the months are at the top of each page so you can skip through.
Waking up the morning after the theme has been announced I was sat for ages thinking of what I could do, and when I read through the post I had made before the theme was announced I realized that I needed to do something special - sewing beetle wings onto a corset I would otherwise have made isn't something I wanted to end up doing.
At this point the wasp dress popped into my mind

I am, in polite terms, less than good when it comes to historical costume. As I mentioned in my first post, I ended up abandoning the one serious attempt I made at a reproduction Victorian outfit. However, I cannot get the wasp out of my mind, and REALLY want to try and make it a reality.

I won't be able to start construction on this for a couple of months, but I will be able to do some research on the early bustle era in the mean time. I am fairly knowledgeable about the Natural Form era, and the late Victorian era, but I know a lot less about either bustle era, so this is going to be an interesting project.

I need to look at what materials were used in dresses of this era, make a set of period appropriate undergarments, and try and find examples of yellow in dresses so I can try and find a shade which would have been period accurate but work for a wasp (baring in mind the originals may have faded over time.) 

If I am going to do a good job of this, I need to figure but how to calculate things like the size of the wasps around the bottom of the underskirt. I am terrible at this kind of thing, so for now I will be going through as many articles on YWU as I can to help me out.

 The cartoon dates from the 1869 and a lot of the extant examples from this date are still the eliptical crinolines, but I have found a few early bustle designs that I think this would have been lampooning, and which give me a good historical springing off point.

I am going to have to use the underskirt I already made, to save money. I've got enough of the gold silk left to do this, but it means I have to use an overskirt that will fit over this.

The overskirt I am planning on using is the 1886 Autumn overskirt - this has same shape at the back creating the shaping reminiscent of the body of a wasp. It will mean my outfit is not historically accurate, but with this project I am going to have to accept that it will just have to be "good enough"

The bodice in the image is fitted with long sleeves and without a peplum at the back - from the lady in the background of the image it is possible to see the decoration of the bodice is also embellished to look like the body of a wasp. 

This will create more of a challenge than the skirt, as it is more complex than just stripes and spots.

The front of the ensemble isn't visible on this cartoon - it isn't a fashion plate, and Sambourn didn't draw it with the intention of it being recreated, but it looks like the overskirt doesn't have a front to it. This would indicate that the bodice and overskirt may work better as a polonaise on a real life interpretation of the wasp. If it is possible to alter the bodice and the overskirt to create a polonaise with no front drapery I would like to do this and the patterns I am looking at using for this are the 1885 cuirass bodice, which I already own, or the 1887 Alexandra bodice. I think the front of the outfit will be rather plain if I use the cuirass bodice, but the patterns are quite expensive and it will save money to use the one I have, along with the fact it looks like it will be easier to adapt to a polonaise.

I will use the Frances Grimble "reconstruction era" book to look for some period accurate trims which can be used on the sleeves of the bodice. The pleats with wasp motifs at the bottom will probably look more dramatic with the rest of the front left plain, so I think I would rather this than using the bodice and overskirt separately to retain the front drapery of the overskirt.

The colours of the drawing indicate that the top portion should be black, and the underskirt should be yellow. Although I would normally balk at the idea of using so much yellow, I think I am going to stay faithful to the drawing.

I am going to add a watteau train at the shoulder seam on each side - I am probably going to use a smokey/tobacco coloured silk chiffon, mimicking the colour of wasp wings. This is obviously not historically accurate, but I am trying to recreate the cartoon, and this means I can stray a bit like this.