What, you’re telling me you’ve never gotten in the mood to make paniers?

That’s what I thought.

The Dreamstress put up a Panier-Along tutorial a while ago for paniers circa 1760-1780, and I’ve got an event to wear these to in April. Yes, April. And no, I don’t have any other 18th century items yet. Gotta start somewhere! (Even if I have a ton of things I need to make before April.) But these are super easy, required no fitting, and were mostly stash materials.

Cotton tape which are channels for the hoop wire. Note to self, start taking photos in better lighting.

Not really going to take pictures of the process, since you can just read through the panier along, and mine look basically the same (except not nearly as nice. But in your head you will only be thinking of those much nicer ones. SCORE.)

And lo, in my head I have dubbed these The Marlborough Paniers.

For everyone blinking along , it’s named after my high school. My high school colors were bright purple and white, which was really kindof a terrible combination. So these paniers are giving me interesting flashbacks to my 7th grade P.E. uniform which was a purple tshirt and white sweatshorts. (Is that a word? What else would you call shorts made of sweatshirt fleece material?)

The purple is a cotton poplin I bought ~2 years ago to be used as a dress lining. Don’t know what I was thinking, since it’s way too stiff and rough to be used as a lining against the skin. But, the really tight weave and stiffness will be good for this. I do have some linen canvas which would be much more period accurate, but I’d rather save that for something else. The twill tape is cotton, which I bought in a giant roll a year ago figuring it would be useful for something.

I did have to buy hoop wire, and annoyingly a 20 yd roll, since this stuff isn’t sold by the yard.

Working on these for 1-2 hours a day are making them go pretty quickly, should be able to finish up this weekend (especially since I have Thursday and Friday off from work for the holidays, booyah)