From the Archives: Regency Flower Ballgown for Felicity

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.)

A Winterhalter Princess Dress for an American Girl Doll

 

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

 

I ran a double row of ribbon around the waist, again punctuating with orange floss. To balance all the yellow I ran a row of large orange knots around the neckline, and as a final splash of color I made a very large bow indeed from the striped cotton, edged it with the mokuba ribbon, and sewed it onto the back waist!

Addy was quite pleased.

A Breezy Summer Hat

Aniline Halloween

Aside from making a pair of Zombie Monkeys, I thought it would be nice to do something American-Girl-dollish for Halloween.

Addy doesn't do zombie, so we compromised with a fashion plate or two.

Like the skirt trim in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

And the bodice in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

I used the American Girl Addy School Outfit for the base pattern.

 I sewed the blouse from Swiss cotton, and  mixed it up a little with embroidery down the front.  A Halloween skull earring made a seasonally appropriate brooch.

The skirt and bretelles were sewn from a chequered orange silk - a pair of fabulous trousers my sister wore in the mid-90s - and trimmed in a soft satin ribbon. 

I wanted a longer jacket, like this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

Unfortunately, my velvet had been stored folded. Between the creases I had just enough bits to eke out the regular zouave jacket from the AG pattern.

The electric orange soutache is what I could find in the Wyalla Spotlight store before we left Australia.
Sure, it's only just on the demure side of neon, but it simply screams Halloween.

As for the hat - behold the rehabilitated cracktastic hat of 80's doom!

 All it took were a crystal spider and a gold skull and we've gone from horror to October chic.

The Cracktastic Hat Bounces BACK

 

My little halloween-y hat, last seen looking like something Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger's bridesmaids would have worn, languished for a year, stripped and undressed.
Over this past weekend, I picked it out of my 'To DO, you great Procrastinator, you!' pile, and redecorated.
            Black feathers, ribbons, a spider-brooch with the brooch-ery stripped off, and voila!
It's still reasonably cracktastic: I'd thick-headedly attached the original decorations with hot-glue, and this time around had to use enough froof-ery to cover the hot-glue scars, but if you can't go bonkers with the frou-frou on Halloween, when can you?
            This little hat does not exist within a vaccum - it belongs to a halloween-colored outfit that I completed just before the move.
            Consider these photos to be in the nature of a teaser - complete outfit coming soon!

The Black Domino

Vogue 7923 sure gets around.

Here it is in black, with a scarlet satin lining - all out of Polimoda's lovely remnant bin, to match my Venetian doctor's mask.

While I was at Polimoda I planned a Carnival costume for my AG doll.

I did my due diligence, researching comedia dell'arte costumes in the school library, and scrounging in the heavenly Polimoda remnant bins for fabrics and trim.

I made a design of my own, proceeded as far as sewing the domino - and then I left Polimoda and the rest of the costume never quite got off the ground.

Maybe one day.

The White Lace Dress - Vogue 7350

Several years ago now, I bought a roll of doll-scale vintage lace in an antique shop in New Harmony, Indiana.  New Harmony Indiana is mostly antique shops. Antique shops, book shops and cornfields on the edge of the wide, slow, Wabash river. It's summertime heaven on a slow Sunday afternoon. A year or so later, I sewed Vogue 7350 with some very fine swiss cotton voile that has been in Mum's stash for years and years and years.
This pattern certainly got me over my fear of sewing with lace - the hours picking scraps of tissue paper out of thread seams on thread lace as I stitched the yoke panels left me with no mysteries and no terrors. Lace is now very firmly do-able, thank you.

Yummy dress details:

And because I love making wired ribbon flowers, she needed a sash with a big bow on it.  Just something simple:

The purse is the sort of thing that happens on Saturday afternoons when you have nothing scheduled to do and you can do exactly whatever you want to do. I had a scrap of white silk, a meter of beaded fringe and a bag of lace remnants from my mother's wedding gown - I cut out roses from the wedding lace and appliquéd them onto the silk, and across the body of the purse I scattered clusters of embroidered petals and beads stripped from the fringing.
More beads made the purse handle and I stitched it all together by hand.
I adore it. It's fabulous.

And so, Once More with Feeling:

Hide and Seek (but mostly hide)

Felicity the AG doll is hiding in the closet.  There's red dust outside!!!

(Felicity is not entirely rapt about living in the desert.  The red soil gets everywhere.  Which is problematic when your body is made of cotton.)

A Brown hat

She doesn't smoke cigarettes or rub burned cork on her eyelids, but she's about two steps away from rolling up her stockings and rouging her knees.... or she would be if I knew how to get rouge out of vinyl.
Being a fashionable dolly only goes so far.

The pattern for this little number came from a now-apparently-and-tragically-defunct doll hat company called Cathy Stuart Designs.
            (Ignore the Silver Robe Francaise that she's wearing. She lives in a state of temporal and existential confusion. What can I say? She's a doll. She spends most of her life with sewing pins stuck into her torso. That'd unhinge anybody.)

 

 

I made two of their hats - this one and a lovely Gainsborough, and then the company's phone was disconnected and my mail-orders were returned to sender.
A pity- they designed great hats!

The Great Blue Baroque Dress

This blue rococo-ish-gown is one of the first doll dresses I ever made.

The fabrics come from a wonderful little fabric shop in Boston's Chinatown.  They sold remnants of designer fabrics - not much, just a meter or two of each, but every remnant was a) Spectacular, b) just enough to make one really fabulous doll dress and c) Priced at genuine remnant prices - $5 or so.

One weekend I found this lovely crinkly polyester satin and a embroidered  black net and thought…huzzah!

And dashed off to the trim section of the store to pick up silver laces and trims...

The overskirt was originally intended to be a polonaise, which is why I made it so long.  I basted the net to the satin and cartridge pleated 54 inches of fabric into the waist, and we loved the look of it so completely that we couldn't bear to pull it up into loops.  It had gravitas.  And flow.

The Back:

 

The Front:

We made this dress the same summer The Patriot - Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War movie - came out.  I'd just made the dress so mum and I absolutely HAD to see the movie - I remember hugging her and both of us squee-ing with pleasure when we saw the ribbon necklaces that the ladies wore - they'd clearly based their costumes on MINE!

And I love the stomacher.  I really really love the stomacher.

And the hairpiece - although I don't have a proper photograph of it - it is an ostrich plume with a wired ribbon rosette and white feather tufts - and a vintage marcasite brooch pinned to the front.

The bodice front doesn't quite match up with the stomacher - chalk it up to early sewing experiences.  This dress has aged amazingly well - it's still one of my favorites - if not THE favorite.   It's exuberant!  All bright and colorful and joyful!

Yummy Details:

And once more, just for fun: