This Regency ballgown for an American Girl Doll was made as a distraction from reality during my final fortnight of grad school presentations. Unsurprisingly, is an impressive mess of bad construction decisions (no lining under that crepe silk bodice? Really?!)
(But hey, Felicity is the least prima-donna of my AG dolls. It’s Addy who has standards for couture. Felicity will model just about anything.)
The gown was inspired by this c.1815 color plate of a lavender ballgown decorated with large clusters of artificial flowers:
The pattern for this ball gown was based on Josefina’s Christmas dress from Pleasant Company, with some tweaking to the sleeves. The underskirt and under-sleeves are sewn from white silk charmeuse, and the overdress of lavender silk crepe and i did something rather foolish with both fabrics. The lavender silk crepe bodice i did NOT line, but the white silk charmeuse i did. With the petticoat, the intention was a reasonable one – i wanted to create a solid base for attaching the flowers. Unfortunately, the iron-on interfacing that I had in my stash was a terrible match for the weight of the charmeuse silk, and the finished skirt became stiff and then began to buckle.
I have absolutely no explanation for why i didn’t line the bodice!
The three-dimensional flower bouquets are the one part of the gown that i feel solidly happy about – they’re made from wired silk ribbons in various widths and colors, stitched into clusters on millinery buckram and tacked to the white skirt:
A view of the wired silk ribbon bouquets on the white silk underskirt:
Yes, I probably should have hand-hemmed the lavender crepe.
Here’s a better look at the back of the gown:
The back waist detail is composed of another sprig of wired silk ribbons and a fall of 7mm silk ribbons in purple, lavender and white.
It’s all kind of a mess, but hey – it was fun. I kind of love it.