And the Groom wore…

Thank you so much for all your praise for my wedding dress! Perhaps you’d like to read what the groom wore? Robin’s outfit has a heavy nod to the 18th century, although not being strictly historically authentic. (It was only once we’d started all this sewing caper that I realised we had a 1920s bridesmaid dress, a medieval meets Edwardian wedding dress and an 18th century groom!)

The coat is itself probably a post for another day, so let’s look at what went underneath.

The white linen shirt is made from a pattern from The Recollections of J.P. Ryan, a pattern company that specialises in the Georgian Era. The shirt went together incredibly easily and quickly, being mostly lots of large squares and rectangles, with the shaping achieved with gathering, and square gussets under the arms and triangular gussets at the neck. It was much larger and longer than a modern shirt, as was the style in the 18th Century, with full dropped shoulder sleeves:

It was a good well drafted pattern, but I couldn’t figure how on earth to attach two strips across each shoulder (a bit like sewn down epaulettes). These would apparently have reinforced the shoulder, in the absence of a shoulder seam (the body of the shirt is one huge piece of fabric, slashed on the fold for the neck). After the neck edge had been gathered, I had no idea where to line up the end of the shoulder strip over the gathering and triangular neck gussets set in each side of the neck. Ultimately I thought the shirt would look much better without these shoulder strips anyway, so it wasn’t a great loss.

Because the shirt didn’t have to look historically accurate, but more fantasy historical, we made some alterations. The cuffs were altered and made longer, but also shaped so they would wing out diagonally away from the hand, and button at the wrist.

We changed the neck placket from a simple “machine a strip on, slash and turn to the inside and stitch by hand into place” to a more modern variation of the placket, with buttons and buttonholes. Robin put together a knotwork inspired design to represent the Old Norse World Tree of Yggdrasil, and I executed it in a simple Holbein stitch around the placket in a green embroidery cotton to match his coat. We thought about doing the cuffs and collar too, but there wasn’t time, and in retrospect I think that would have been overdoing it. Robin wore a green silk cravat as a kind of neck tie/stock, so the embroidery was hidden, until later in the evening when the cravat came off, and there was just a flash of embroidery every now and then.

I would love to tell you about the waistcoat, but Robin made it himself. I’m actually incredibly lucky enough to be married now to someone who is almost as interested as I am in sewing and all things costume related. Again, it’s a J.P. Ryan pattern, with the collar modified to a stand-up one. The front is a cotton twill, with self-covered buttons, and the back and lining are a finer white cotton.

(I wish I could tell you we made the trousers, but we didn’t. We cheated. They came from Austin Reed…)

The sword, which did a fantastic job of cutting the cake, was commissioned from Heron Armoury, and is now referred to as “the other woman”.