The dress The dress is based on a dress, or rather the bodice of a dress, seen on page 172 in Jane Ashelford's The Art of Dress. A dress with a similar wrap over front, but without
the frill can be seen at the Manchester City Museum's
web site.
The fabric used is linen with a printed stripe in cream, light chocolate brown and pink. Cotton would have been a more fashinable choice in the time, but
it was cheap and pretty. And easy to sew, as opposed to the tightly woven cotton used for the petticoat. The dress and actually all parts of this costume, except the stays, were sewn by hand.
The dress opens at one side in the front and is closed with two small mother-of-pearl buttons and thread loops. There are buttons on the inside too, to keep the other part of the wrap over bodice in place.
The wrap over bodice is a little loose, but I will move one of the buttons to make it tigher under the bust.
The stays The stays are my first early 19th century stays and therefore, since they're really a trial version they're sewn on machine (except the lacing holes) and made from an old linen table cloth.
Apart from the wooden busk the only "boning" is hemp cord. One row on each side of the busk, two rows on each side of the lacing holes and three rows in a line under the bust. The
latter was inspired by this extant corset, found through the excellent Démodé web site.
Actually, I owe lots of thanks to Kendra (the owner of the Démodé site) for the stays, as I made the pattern after pictures of preserved stays and period drawings. I was going
to borrow my friend Ragnhild's Mantua Maker's regency stays pattern, but since she lives in Oslo, Norway, it would have taken so much time that I decided to draft my own. And I'm very happy with it.
It looks quite a lot like the "naughty" drawings from the 1820s, which though a little late show the same type of stays as preserved examples from 1810-1820.
The petticoat The petticoat is mainly based on descriptions in Jean Hunnisett's Period Costume for Stage and Screen and from Katherine's dress site. It's made from
cotton and entirerly hand sewn; I even made the thread buttons myself. Information on period construction and sewing technique was aquired from Pernilla Rasmussen's
and Britta Hammar's Kvinnligt mode under tvĺ sekel (Female fashion through two centuries).
The petticoat has an apron front opening and is closed with two ribbons, one on each side of the "apron" part, that tie in the back. The width of the skirt is gathered with cartridge pleating to the back of the bodice.
The hem is decorated with one pin tuck and cotton lace.
The bonnet I made the bonnet from an old child's straw hat. The hat was made with straw braid that was chain stitched in place by machine. The chain stitch made it very easy to unravel.
I unravelled the whole hat except some of the crown and then started to shape a bonnet; all the time being careful to keep the straw braid damp. It was rather easy. I was, however, not totally happy with the shape of it,
the brim went down too far on the sides. So, since unpicking my stitches would be far more work than the orginla unravelling, and damaging to the braid too, I decided to cut off pieces of the brim and bind the edges of the bonnet with something.
"Something" turned out to be blue silk taffeta, which I also used for the ties. Since straw snags your hair I also lined the bonnet with white silk. Both the ties and the roses, which are made from silk dupioni, come from an earlier attempt to make a regency hat;
not very succesful, so the bonnet was finished in less than two days.
Final words
Nothing of this costume would have been made without the help I got from studying Katherine's dress site and reading her LiveJournal where she writes
about her sewing. Empire dresses may seem simple, but they're not and I must admit I felt a little afraid when I first looked at the construction in Janet Arnold's Patterns of fashion.
