The power puff girls! 1830s christmas event

I’ve been wanting to do a romantic era dress for a while now. The sillyness of the huuuuge gigot sleeves along with the pooffy slightly short skirts just really speaks to me. So when an excuse came up I jumped at the opportunity. I had this glazed cotton stripe fabric remnant bolt I bought a while ago that I thought would look cute in this. Unfortunately that was a very very bad choice because it ended up being nearly impossible to sew and though the red is a good shade for me the yellow really isn’t and it really washes me out. I still love the era and want to revisit it but I’m kinda still done with this dress.

I watched the american duchess youtube videos on the 1830s and read bits of the work woman’s guide on google books and drafted my pattern based on those. The sleeves are straight from the work woman’s guide, they are basically a full circle with a cut to make the forearm bit.

I fitted the bodice on by basting the center back were the closure is going to be shut and pinned the front center to the correct shape and pinned the darts on. In this era the darts top stitched on so this is the easyest way to fit them.

First I machine basted the bodice up leaving the center front open. After fitting everything I ripped my back seams open and resewed them with piping and sewed the front closed with the piping. Now after doing this I found out that apparently historically they were usually piped on top but I’m still not sure how so for me the modern way is good enough. The sleeves are the point were my troubles really started and were I began to hate this project. To fit all that sleeve in the tiny piped armhole I cartridge pleated the sleeve but because the fabric was so impossible to hand sew it endeds up really sloppy and took forever to do. Also because of the piping my stitches ended up far wierd and showing from the right side so I needed to sew another set of stitches keeping the pleats with the piping edge but apparently they didn’t end up well enough through the fabric and ripped out so I’ll have to redo them.

Here you can see I couldn’t event fold down the fabric for clean edged pleats because my needle just wouldn’t go through

Then with the bodice ready it all gets attached to the waistband and the skirts get sewn on to that edge. Here everything looked fine but apparently having just the bodice be short waisted and have the waistband come to your natural waist is not high enough, the actual waistband edge should have come slightly higher that my natural waist. Luckily most of the bunching from to too long waist is hidden by the belt that is worn over the gown to show off that belt buckle but it still annoyes me and in future gowns I’ll do it differently. This one I will not fix! I decided to make my life easyer and pleat the skirt normally so that I could machine sew it. The problem with that was that at most parts that meant there was atleast 5 layers of this beastly fabric to sew through and my poor sewing machine needles just couldn’t take that! I ended up having to slowly hand crank the entire waist on and still broke 4 needles and it took like 45 minutes to sew on.

The back closes with hooks and eyes and it has pocket slits at the sides just like an 18th century gown. After sewing on the waistband I put this dress on a nearly month long timeout and did other projects but still it was not really reconsiled me to it and I think I’ll just make another gown to wear for next time out of some material that will play nicer.

As you can see from my drawing I was planning on making a black pelerine to wear with this to help with the not really being my color at all issue but with all the sewing projects this season I ran out of time. So off to pinterest I headed to look for quick solutions to my problem and found this picture:

I have a vintage 70s or 80s muskrat fur that had broken a bit and was also too small for me so I had cut it up to make things out of so I cut the collar off that, whipped the edge shut with buttonhole thread and added velvet ties. Not only did it work perfectly with the dress but also with my riding habit coat that ended up being partly unfinished because I ran out of time. The same fate befell my bonnet, only the brimm was finished and I just quickly tacked on a temporary crown to it to make it wearable for the event. So I’ll share the bonnet and coat at a later date after they are in their full glory.

We had a fun event and I’m once again very much in love with this era but still really don’t like this dress much eventhough I had lots of fun wearing it. We shall see if I’ll like it better in a few months or if I’ll just end up making a new gigot sleeve dress soon.