Historical Inspiration Festival – Regency Ballgown for an American Girl Doll

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:

3/4 view of an american girl doll wearing a regency ballgown

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:

1815 Fashion plate showing a lavender regency ballgown with a white underpetticoat

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!

Front View of an American Girl Doll wearing a lavender silk regency ball gown

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:

Side View of an American Girl Doll wearing a lavender silk regency ball gown

A view of the wired silk ribbon bouquets on the white silk underskirt:

Close-up view of wired ribbon flowers on the skirt of an american girl doll regency ballgown

The back of the gown:

Back View of an American Girl Doll wearing a lavender silk regency ball 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:

Close-up view of wired ribbon flowers at the back waist of an American Girl doll regency ballgown

Thank you for inviting me to join the Historical Inspiration Festival!

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

One thought on “Historical Inspiration Festival – Regency Ballgown for an American Girl Doll

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *