A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

The history of white wedding dresses is a popular topic, and a few related narratives have built up in both popular and academic writing: Queen Victoria was the first to wear a white gown for her wedding in 1840, and women began to copy her, creating a tradition. Queen Victoria was not the first to wear a white wedding dress, but it experienced a boom in popularity as a result of her marriage. Queen Victoria was not the first to wear a white wedding dress, but it was only with her marriage that it took on the connotations of purity and innocence. I could digress to talk about the perils of "Great Man" history, but that's  better for a discussion on Chanel (hey-o!), so instead let's just look at why these narratives are all incorrect, and why Victoria was not really a turning point at all. (For the use of white, that is - Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck make a very convincing argument in Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding  that Victoria's wedd...

This one has a lot of progress images! When I cut out the sleeves, I figured that because the pattern ( Regency Women's Dress , p.98) appeared to fit me at the wrist, I could just cut out the sleeve exactly as drawn. Not so! I sewed the seam on one and it was far too tight in the forearm, so I pieced in a tapered strip under the arm, which I did not bother to match as it cannot be seen. The next step after that was to hem the part of the seam left open near the wrist and pin the trim into place - note that the trim pieces are not symmetrical and must be matched with the proper sleeve. The cuffs were then piped all the way around, and sewn down on one long and two short sides. The remaining side was put right-side-to-right-side over the trim and end of the sleeve and sewn down through all layers. The corners were snipped to allow the allowances to be turned in. Then I turned to the armscyes. These needed to be cut into, mostly in front, to be big enough...

So, after getting the bodice mostly ready to go, I turned to the skirt. The pieces were easy enough to cut out: if you look at the pattern ( Regency Women's Dress , p.98), you can see that there are mostly rectangles, plus one gore on each side. It was fairly simple - I used the same proportional method that I did on the bodice. If the front panel on the original was (for example) 150% of the waist before pleating, I made mine 150% of my waist; if the pleated width was 50% of the waist, I pleated it down to 50%. For the gore, I increased the top this way and then ran the slanted seam down at the same angle as in the original. The back panels ended up at about 26", so I just used the full width of the fabric (60") and cut a slit in it for the opening, which I turned and sewed with underhand hem stitch (more frequently known by its French name, point à rabattre sous le main ), whipping over the unturnable bit at the bottom. All of the seams were sewn with a small run...

I like giving my projects names - in this case, it's the "Clarissa dress" because I made it to portray Clarissa Moody Wright (1804-1871) in Canton's Dairy Festival Parade. It was difficult to figure out exactly what date to aim for: Clarissa was ten years younger than her husband, but the man who was going to portray Silas* is ... well, there's a larger age difference; I also look young for my age by modern standards and very  young by early nineteenth century standards. So should I dress as Clarissa would have as a long-married woman, or as the age that I look? In the end, I decided that a) it's not much of an educational event, as I won't be doing any actual interpreting, b) nobody in the crowd bar three or four people is going to have any idea that I'm representing a real person, let alone who she is and when she was alive, and c) I really wanted to sew the green checked dress from the mid-1820s from Regency Women's Dress . That seems fair to me...

My very first post to this blog was a kind of a summary of corset construction and style in the period 1790-1810. It's awkwardly written, because I was excerpting from a paper and summarizing and wasn't used to blogging like this! It seems like a good time to revisit the topic, now that I've spent even more time analyzing the period. The stays of the early 1790s were essentially those of the 1780s, cut with a higher waist - conical, and heavily or half boned. Very quickly, though, the silhouette changed. Artistic portraits had shown women dressed in flowing draperies, belted high, without stays, and at the same time that those high-waisted flowing draperies entered mainstream fashion, so did softly rounded breasts. While some women achieved this look by not wearing any stays at all, for most, the idea that a boned and laced undergarment was essential to respectability held strong. Non-satirical sources refer to corsets' and stays' existence through this time - for...

It took me forever to figure out what to write for this! I knew that the Redo challenge needed to be October's Secret challenge, which I missed, but Secret was much easier to do while sewing, putting a little secret embroidery or hidden pocket. At last I remembered an historic dress that has its own secret. Evening dress; Old Sturbridge Village 26.33.132 This gown, in the collection of Old Sturbridge Village, was among the ones I evaluated for patterning when I went there last year. And because it appears to be a lovely early 1820s evening dress, I patterned it. But while I was patterning, I realized that this lovely gown holds a terrible secret - it's not from the period! It's the best costume/reproduction I've ever seen in a museum, to the point where I really grappled with myself in deciding what was going on with the gown: idiosyncratic Regency garment, or very well-made costume? In the end, I decided it was likely a costume, despite the fact that it's e...

As a member of several historical-reenactment Facebook groups, I see a lot of people post a photo of cloth they've bought or are thinking of buying with a question about its suitability for a certain era. And so I thought I would write up a guide to give seamstresses more confidence in choosing a fabric, and perhaps help prevent people from buying something too modern and only discovering it once they get home. Note: you can of course use anything you want. You can make a spencer and petticoat out of a Hello Kitty print, if you like, and actually that would be pretty fun. Please see this guide as a helpful aid for those aiming at accuracy, rather than a prescription. White Cotton Let's start with the easiest category: white cotton.  The simplest way to make sure that your fabric is accurate is to pick a white cotton at either end of the spectrum - very light and smooth, or completely solid and with some body. With the lighter, sheerer cottons, you can also use a woven c...