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 Great MOVE

All doll-and-sewing-related activities went on Splendid Hiatus at the end of June when Mr Tabubil and I relocated from Whyalla in rural South Australia, to the teeming and tumultuous metropolis of Santiago, Chile.

            Even four months after a move, personal organization - and the time to make it happen - is precious difficult to find.  There's so much to do - household insurance to be sorted, GPs and dentists to found, bottomless lists of thises and thats for our new apartment, grocery staples that we once took for granted to be hunted down in a country that's never heard of 'em, Spanish classes to take, new friends to make, new streets to walk down, new parks and hills and museums to see -

            There's so much HAPPENING here. I've lived here before, twice, so my Spanish is less non-existent than mostly rusty, and I tear around the city dropping indefinite articles on the sidewalk and tying taxi drivers up in inappropriate verb tenses, but despite the frustrating refusal of certain type of patriotic Chilean to comprehend ANY Spanish spoken by a gringo (regardless of how local the accent - and I learned my Spanish fifteen years ago in a Chilean high school)  I'm getting along swimmingly, and only stop for cascading confusions of "Que?" "

But now I'm back in action, thank you very much.  We're all unpacked, my new sewing room is sorted -

And I'm submitting insurance claims for the disaster the Australian movers caused when they packed up my old one.

            The Australian packers wreaked hell on our stuff, particularly our clothes.  They used flat clothes boxes for about half of our garments (apparently hanging boxes are improper for international moves), but at some point they ran out of flat boxes and instead of going out and getting more, or at least folding our clothes properly and laying them down in regular packing boxes-
            The dear darling movers crumpled up our clothes into balls of cloth and wadded them into the corners of other boxes as padding for heavier items - like computer monitors, or stereo speakers.

            They didn't do it for lack of regular packing material.
            We have no idea why they did it.
            All we know is that this sort of treatment doesn't do very nice things to delicate sequined shirts, silk scarves, or hand-made costumes. Or bras that have had their foam cups folded into quarters for two months to pad out the side of a box of DVDs . 

            What they did to our clothes they also did to our wedding crystal.  Yup.  It's too unbelievable not to share: they used our wedding crystal to pad out the really heavy item in our shipment - like computer towers and chests of drawers.  Without necessarily bothering to wrap it first. Yep - unwrapped crystal wine-glasses used to brace computer towers.  Thank god for cameras. We documented the heck out of all that.

            It was all enormously  frustrating and angry-making, but when I came across my red and gold ballgown  I burst into tears.  I had asked the mover  to "please please wrap it in its very own box.  Just like this - padded with all this tissue paper right here.  I'll leave it right here all by itself right next to the very own box that you're going to put it in, okay?"

            Instead, the mover squashed and rolled and wadded the dress into the top of another box - the pleats are rubbed out, the flat layers  are screwed up and folded in a way that wrecked the underlying net in a way that can't be repaired by an iron or a steam-bath.  And those little shredded silk details - forget it. The whole dress is pretty well wrecked.

            The unfinished white hat (as yet unrestored. It was a damp winter) died as well.

            The golden wheat-ear embroidery has disappeared entirely.

            And my doll hats - I found a wired doll bonnet squashed and folded, buckram creased, wires bent.  Non salvagable.

            It just went on and on - if there was a way to bust or bodge something, the movers found it.  No matter how creative the mess needed to be - they managed to pull it off.

            One example in particular makes me stomp my feet and chew the curtains.   Surveying the wreckage in my sewing room, I had thought okay, maybe it's all my fault.

            Clearly, I had needed to carefully pack EVERYTHING myself.
            To leave nothing to the mover's imagination.
            Next time I'll do that, okay, fine, breathe deeply, dear - and then I opened a little box where I HAD carefully packed and SEALED with TAPE my straw doll bonnets for safe shipping -  in this this careful little box brim-full of straw doll hats - a mover had un-taped the lid and shoved something inconsequential and heavy inside - and squashed them semi-flat. It's INFURIATING.

            I've made many MANY moves in my 31 years, and I've never seen anything like this. 

            But there have been photographs, and furious late-night tear-filled phone calls to Australia, and things are sorting out. Or at least, getting paid for. The really infuriating part was that when I called the movers in a towering fury, the man on the phone said "oh... yeah.  I think I know who the person who did that is.  There have been a few instances of him doing it."

            So he's done it BEFORE?  And they're still paying him?

            Amazing!

            And - END rant.  Exuent omnes and all that.

            I have a drawer-ful of little projects to finish (that got caught up in the move) and photograph, and a dress to try and restore!

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:

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: