This small regency gown was put together as a rather drastic holiday from reality during my final fortnight of grad school presentations. Unsurprisingly, is an unholy mess of bad construction decisions (and no lining under that crepe silk bodice? Really?!)
It gives me enormous happiness anyway. It was FUN.
(And hey, Felicity is the least prima-donna of my AG dolls. It’s Addy who has standards for couture. Felicity will model anything.)
I'm a sucker for big bows on little dresses. Just as an example, for instance, the shoulder-bows on the fluffy white dresses on the Princesses in the 1846 Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and her family have always been EXACTLY what floats my small dress boat.
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| Franz Xaver Winterhalter, The Royal Family in 1846 via wikimedia commons |
When a scrap of white striped cotton floated up in my stash, I decided that it was time to do something about it. I found some yellow French wired ribbons for the shoulders, and I ordered some orange-to-yellow mokuba ribbon on ebay, and while I waited for the ribbon to arrive, I drafted up a party dress for an early-Victorian Princess.
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I wanted the bodice to be gathered, not pleated, and I wanted the gathers to run STRAIGHT DOWN, not sun-raying away from the neckline, so I ran multiple parallel lines of gathering stitches, basted (excessively) the gathered fabric to a flat cotton base, and cut a wide almost off the shoulder neckline.
The sleeves were done similarly - a gathered puff sewn top and bottom to a smaller cotton base, and then a ruffle added onto the bottom of the sleeve.
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When the mokuba ribbon arrived, I sewed it onto the skirt in an oversized Greek key pattern, tacking it down with knots of cotton embroidery floss.
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