Sewing a Victorian Swimsuit with a Vintage Sewing Pattern for a Victorian Beach Party! 🏖️

In this video, I'm taking you along on my adventure of creating a Victorian-style swimming costume for a themed beach party. With just four days to pull it off, I dive into using a reproduction pattern from 1898 and hunt down the perfect fabric, settling on a light orange to match our group's rainbow theme. I'll show you my entire sewing process, including the ups and downs, like tackling tricky collar and seam issues and even deciding to redo some parts. Despite a few hiccups and a chilly beach day, my friends and I had a blast and captured some stunning photos. I'll also give you another look at my previous project involving pirate costume pieces. If you enjoy the journey, please like and subscribe for more fun and creative content!

⚔️ Victorian Swimsuit Pattern ⚔️
https://www.etsy.com/listing/70081386...

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⚔️ Music Credit ⚔️
Never Say No - Clarence Reed
Astonish - Million Eyes
Barefoot Dancing - Raymond Grouse
What If - Jonatan Mollberg
Sea Adventures - Bonnie Grace

⚔️ Thumbnail Photo Credit ⚔️
Hannah Green
@ clafou.tea on IG

⚔️ Transcription (limited by character count) ⚔️
Hey, it's me, Hannah.

This weekend I am attending a Victorian beach party. That's right. We are history bounding at the beach, and I couldn't be more excited.

However, I just have four days to whip up a historical swimming costume. I am using a Victorian reproduction PDF pattern I found on Etsy, made from an original 1898 pattern from Harper's Bazaar. The pattern seller recommends that users don't buy the pattern unless they have a good amount of sewing experience because the original pattern does not include seam allowances and gives only basic instructions for garment construction. So I'm sure I will be absolutely golden.

When trying to source fabric for this project, I definitely had to do some research. Victorians weren't just wearing spandex. From what I understand, they often used heavy wool or a mix of other similar materials like wool flannel, wool serge, flannel cotton, silk, and linen. I decided to purchase some flannel cotton, and while it was fashionable to typically go with blacks, grays, navies, or even reds, I decided to go with a light orange color, as my friends and I are trying to put together a sort of rainbow look. I did find an article that cited ecru as a color often worn, and I think I could convince myself that this color kind of falls under that umbrella.

I ordered three yards of this pinstriped cotton flannel and three yards of this herringbone. So let's hope that's enough.

Like I said, we have four days, so let's get to work.

I wasn't sure how I was going to finish the seams, so I went ahead and serged all of the edges of the pattern pieces before prepping the pieces for gathering, and then constructing the dress by sewing the shoulder and side seams.

Once I confirmed that the dress part would fit, I got to work on the sleeves. Since these pieces already had basting stitches for gathering, I sewed the sleeve seams, then created the lace cuffs by attaching some elastic with a zigzag stitch, which I then zigzag stitched to the bottoms of the gathered sleeves. I was honestly so happy with how adorable they turned out.

Now, the collar gave me some trouble. I should have just sewn the outside curve with right sides together, then focused on attaching it to the dress, while encasing a few other details.

We've had a bit of a snafu. I've sewn this front fold piece, which is essentially just a tube of fabric that's sewn into the front seam of the dress, inside out. I've also noticed that the collar not only needs to encase the top of this fold piece but also needs to encase the edges of this sort of modesty panel that still needs to be added. So I'm going to completely redo this front seam, then open up just the front bit of this collar to encase this tube and the seams of the modesty panel that needs to be added. Kind of a big oops, but we'll keep going.

I got the fold flipped right side out, so feeling pretty good about that. I went to add this white panel to this front area, but I just feel like it brings the neckline up too high to the point where I can't even pull the dress over my head, so I think I'm just going to drop it. I feel like the neckline as is, is already high enough to avoid any scandalizing. If we place the collar at the right spot, there's a little pop of the rest of the fold coming up that I think actually looks kind of nice. Plus, that panel is so stark white compared to the lace trim I have on the sleeves. So yeah, I think I'm just going to wrap up my night by finishing up the collar, and I will essentially have the top half of my swimming costume all ready to go. Even with this hiccup, I feel like it's going pretty well.