Story of A Seamstress is hosting a Historical Inspiration Costume Festival. She has kindly invited doll costumers to participate – so I’m putting up a couple of of my ‘historically inspired’ outfits!
Introducing Lily:
This regency ballgown was sewn for Felicity during a rather necessary distraction from reality during my final fortnight of grad school presentations. Unsurprisingly, is a impressive mess of bad construction decisions (and no lining under that crepe silk bodice? Really?!)
I love it anyway.
This gown was inspired by this c.1815 color plate of a lavender ballgown decorated with large clusters of 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 did right – 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:
The back of the gown:
The back detail is composed of a sprig of wired silk ribbons and a fall of 7mm silk ribbons in purple, lavender and white:
Thank you for inviting me to join the Historical Inspiration Festival!
I love this! The beautiful lavendar color. and the delicate flowers!
Don't forget to link parts 1 and 2 to my blog as well! :^)