Presenting General and Mrs. Thomas Jesup!

This is a recap of the event at Locust Grove. To read about the construction of my 1822 dress, you can start here.

I know I’m a little late in showing off how the 1822 wedding turned out, but I hope you’ll forgive me when you hear about all the excitement!

For Brandon and I the day started at 10, when we got to Locust Grove and started piling on the layers. Things were right down to the wire, and this was the first time Brandon had put on the finished jacket. Just for kicks, the event landed on a 97 degree day with a 106 degree heat index, so you can imagine how snug he was in thick, dark-colored wool. So glad that an amazing team of other CIs took on the task of creating a jacket from the 1821 regulations (a tricky period since it was a uniform that lasted only a few years, and there is very little documentation about it besides the regs themselves). So many blind-stitched buttonholes.

Luckily I had help putting on shift, stays, petticoat, chemisette, dress and wig. I left the veil off until just before the ceremony–something needed to be a surprise!

The wedding party gathered on the porch at 11 for a final rehearsal (our officiant had to step in at the last moment!). When that was over, Brandon got me to take a quick stroll through the garden before our busy day started. No matter how much stuff I wanted to do, or how many friends I wanted to chat with, he insisted, and by the grape arbor (where we took pictures together our very first time at Locust Grove), he told me he thought it would be weird for us to get fake married before we were really engaged. He dropped to a knee for only a moment (couldn’t risk those breeches getting dirty in the wet grass), but it was enough!

The ring belonged to Brandon’s grandmother, and couldn’t have been more perfect if I’d designed it myself!

So, newly engaged, we scampered off to find our friends. We just about scared poor Brian (the program coordinator) to death when we told him to come with us to find everybody else. I don’t know what disasters were going through his mind in that moment, but we apologize for giving him a mini heart attack. Luckily, our fearless CI leader, Amy, had a couple bottles of champagne squirreled away, and we got a toast out of the way just as the event opened at noon.

Check out that hair bow, though. Period details for the win. Image by Fox and Rose Photography

The men went off to carouse and shoot the fowler.

It was so humid out that they were only able to get a couple of shots out due to damp powder. Image by Fox and Rose Photography

The ladies started our day on the porch, where we could catch guests as they went into the house and talk up the wedding later in the day.

My lovely reticule was a gift from the ladies of the Jane Austen Society! Image by Fox and Rose Photography

We spent the afternoon wandering the grounds, chatting, and watching readings of Jane Austen’s early works, while the other CI ladies found married guests to ask for advice on my behalf. There was much giggling and blushing and grinning, all compounded by the excitement of a real engagement! The news was all around the event the moment it started. People we’d never seen before came up to congratulate us. Brandon had to rush to intercept his mom and brother when they arrived to make sure they heard it first from him instead of a stranger!

As the ceremony drew nearer, the ladies retired to the great parlor to prepare:

How gorgeous is the light in this picture? Image by Fox and Rose Photography

This was my absolute favorite part of the day. It was a perfect moment in interpreting: alive and vibrant. We were able to really bring the excitement of the day to the guests, and interact with people who came through the house on an intimate level. The moment I put my veil on and looked in the mirror sent a little shiver down my back as well.

I couldn’t believe how fast the day flew by, and too soon it was time to leave this space and head to the main event!

Major Croghan walking his daughter to the ceremony. This is my favorite shot of my outfit! Image by Fox and Rose Photography

If you were there, you may have recognized the ceremony from the 1995 A&E Pride and Prejudice, but with all the extra fire-and-brimstone that they left out. My favorite bit is when he has to dedicate his body to me. Oddly enough, I did not have to do the same for him.

Thanks to Albert Roberts for stepping in at the last minute and doing a fantastic job with the fire-and-brimstone traditional Presbyterian ceremony. Image by Fox and Rose Photography

After the ceremony, we retired to a lovely tent for cake, wine and more congratulations than we knew what to do with. Thanks to everyone who was there! The day couldn’t have been better.

The wedding party: Mary O’Hara (played by Melissa Alexander), Ann Croghan Jesup (me), General Thomas Jesup (Brandon), and William Croghan Jr (Sam Loomis). Image by Fox and Rose Photography

We meant to get back to the grape arbor and take some pictures for posterity, but never did get around to it. Luckily, the whole day was captured beautifully by Heather Hiner of Fox and Rose Photography. You can find more fun recaps of the event on the Locust Grove blog.

Now we get to look forward to another day just as special next year!

Hannah

If you want to read about the making of this dress, you can begin here.

Miss Croghan’s Accessories, Part 2: Tambour Time!

Lacemaking has always been one of those crafts that has interested me, but that I never seemed to have the time to pursue. Things like bobbin lacemaking and tatting are time consuming and complicated to learn. I decided I wanted to learn one of the methods that involves embroidering designs onto mesh, instead of arranging threads to create a strip of lace. Finally, earlier this year, I went and did some research into the myriad methods of making. There are several different methods involving embroidery, and of them all, I landed on tambour for my first attempt. Tambour turns up in England around the 1760s, when lightweight muslins from India became popular. It requires only two tools: an embroidery hoop on a stand, and a sharp hook, which is used to tie a series of chain stitches through fabric. Here are images of the hook, and a tambour shawl from the 19th c.

The art was incredibly popular in the Regency, and can be used not only on mesh, but on fabric for dresses, cushions, and more. Tambour is easy to learn, and once you get comfortable with it, much faster than any other kind of embroidery. I picked it because of it’s speed, popularity, and the fact that the basic motion of it, using a hook to create interconnected loops, has similarities to both wigmaking and crochet, so I hoped to pick it up quickly.

*Edit–I’ve been doing tambour, and improving my technique for several years now, and if you are interested in starting to learn yourself, you can start right here on Fabric & Fiction, with my new Tambour Lace tutorial series!*

Brandon got me the things I needed to start doing tambour for my birthday in March, but then things go so busy that I never got the chance to start, though I had several projects planned. But in the past couple of weeks, I could put it off no longer, because guess what Ann Croghan needed for her wedding? A veil! Once again, these two lovely brides from 1820 and 1823 were my inspiration.

Both brides wear a lace veil attached behind their hairstyle with a triangular headpiece that sits on the top of the head. I set out to recreate the style.

First I scoured Ackermann’s Repository issues from 1821 and early 1822 for embroidery patterns I liked. I landed on this one from November 1821:

Since I was crunched for time, I decided to do only the border, and skip the allover pattern of smaller flowers and sprigs. I also skipped doing a more traditional marking method like sewing a running stitch around the design in favor of my trusty water-soluble marker. The event is coming up fast after all!

For the first few motifs, I was afraid I’d never finish in time. Panicked thoughts ran through my head. “Oh God, I had so many projects planned. This is terrible! I’ve made a dreadful mistake!” But soon enough I got the hang of things: the tension, the way you have to vary stitch size around tight curves and at corners, and eventually I was zipping along at a pace I couldn’t have imagined at the beginning.

The pattern is made up of alternating leaf and flower motifs, so I thought I’d show you how each one of these motifs went together, starting with one of the leaves:

The flowers definitely turned out to be the simpler, quicker part of the pattern:

It was a stroke of luck that Jon Stewart’s Month of Zen was happening right now.

The piece contains 63 motifs total, so the final two were a welcome sight!

But while embroidering is fun, getting rid of all those pesky thread ends is not. Each thread starts with something called a waste knot, which you can see in the  third picture. The thread is tied to the mesh outside of the pattern, then brought through to the back so it’s in the right place for embroidering. Each of these knots had to be snipped, and both ends of the thread woven through the back of the embroidery to secure them (no knots in embroidery unless they’re part of the pattern!). I thought about counting how many thread ends there were, before deciding that that was insane. Suffice it to say, there were a lot!

Finally, I trimmed the veil edges into  scallops following the shape of the pattern, and removed all of the blue marker. After a nice press the veil was ready to go.

Thread ends in and edges trimmed, there was nothing else between me and that silly little lacy triangle that perches on top of the bride’s head.

I used a bit of spare buckram from my last bonnet to make the triangle. Luckily I’m working on a wig for myself as well, so I could test out the size using the wig head. (More to come on that later!)

I covered the triangle in white silk batiste, which would give it a smoother finish, while remaining translucent, as the headpieces of the fashion plate brides seem to be.

And once again, what bride doesn’t need as much froofy lace as possible, so I attached two rows of gathered lace around the edges:

With veil and headpiece both ready, it was time to attach them. I gathered the top, un-embroidered edge of the veil, and arranged the gathers against the headpiece until I had enough space for a bun to poke through. I could have just sewn the ends together, but a few weeks ago I ordered some vintage silk orange blossoms (a very popular wedding flower) to wear in my hair, and the seller sent couple of cute little tiny roses on single wires with them.

I slipped the wire through the mesh of the veil and the lace on the headpiece, and wrapped the wire around to secure it. This way, I can easily remove the veil and use it for something else, or adjust it if the bun works differently than expected.

Here’s the completed piece over my real hair. I’m excited to see what it looks like with the correct hairstyle!

I’m now in real crunch time trying to make sure I get my wig done in time, so back to work! Come see the whole outfit in action at Locust Grove on July 18th!

Hannah

Miss Croghan’s Accessories, Part 1: Things Get Ruff

When I first started interpreting 1816, I loved pretty much every aspect of clothing (as I do in many eras) but there was one accessory I shook my head at. I laughed about it. I swore I would never wear it. You’ll see what I mean:

The Ruff. (These are, in order, an 1815 fashion plate from Costume Parisien, an 1815 fashion plate by John Bell and an 1815 sketch by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, one of my favorite portrait painters.)

I thought it was silly. Why would anyone want to make their neck wider? Or look like a disgruntled chicken fluffing her feathers?

But it says something about how fashion works that the longer I’ve been doing Regency, and the more images I look at, the more I like the ruff. It’s frilly and feminine, and it’s one of those details that is so beautifully, distinctly a part of its era. It can really give a period outfit that finishing touch that makes it seem like more than a costume.

And ruffs like these, inspired by Elizabethan fashion, stuck around though the 18-teens and into the ’20s. In 1822, when Ann Croghan wed Thomas Jesup, they were still fashionable in all shapes and sizes:

(Extant dress ca. 1818, 1822 La Belle Assemble Fashion Plate, 1822 Ackermann’s Repository Fashion Plate)

So I set out to make my  very own chemisette with attached ruff (a chemisette is a simple garment that fills in the neckline of a low-cut gown in order to make it more modest for use during the day). The nice part about this particular accessory is that when it has done its duty for the wedding, it can go into my regular 1816 wardrobe. I kept the ruff on the small side for 1822 in order to ensure that this is the case.

The basic structure of a chemisette is incredibly simple. The body has three pieces: one back piece and two front pieces (I believe they can also go the other way, with the opening in the back). The real fun and interest of a chemisette comes with the collar: plain, ruffled, lacy, embroidered, or full on ruff. Mine is made of cotton voile, so it is a bit sheer, but not overly so.

The only seams in the body are at the shoulders. Since there’s no lining, I made these french seams, meaning that I sewed a narrow seam with the wrong sides together, then flipped it around with right sides together and sewed a second seam that encased the raw edges. I flipped back the fabric edge for the second photo so you can see both the finished edge and the raw edge it is enclosing.

Then it’s time to hem, and hem, and hem. Every edge but the neck needs a hem. The bottom hem is slightly wider so that you can put a string though to secure it under the bustline.

The collar is tall, so that it can fit plenty of lacy goodness, with overlapping points in the center where it comes together. Like most collars, it is made of two identical pieces sewn together, which makes neat edges all around, and gives a bit of extra stability for attaching those ruffles.

Since the collar needs to fit snugly around my neck, the body of the chemiette had to be gathered into it, which I think adds another level of pretty detail. With the collar attached, the only thing left to do was the lace. I got a pretty simple cotton lace with a pattern of dots for it, since all those layers meant the pattern wouldn’t be very visible anyway. Plus the dots imitate the dotted Swiss dress fabric, which I enjoy.

Now the fun part! (Look at me accidentally taking pictures going every which way)

My chemisette and lace even got to come with me on a trip to my parent’s house in Michigan. (See that blue carpeting? Chicago O’Hare.)

Once the lace was all gathered and attached, I just had to add a couple of strategic hook and eyes and here it is:

I took pictures first without the dress, so you can see how the whole thing works. Next time I do one of these, I’ll get more lace and gather it more so that it really wants to stand out, but I think this is a nice not-too-ostentatious start to my ruff-wearing experience.

Here it is with the dress on.

Bonus picture: I made a corded petticoat last week (no blog post about that because there’s only so many pictures you can take of sewing 25 pieces of cord between two layers of fabric before everyone falls asleep), so here’s a picture of the dress with all its corresponding underthings in place.

The event is coming up quickly (only three weeks!), so it’s good to see things coming together. There’s still a wig and veil to complete, though! Don’t forget to come see it at Locust Grove on July 18th!

Hannah

The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 4: Finis

Deep breath. And. IT’S FINISHED! Exactly one month to the day after I started this crazy journey, Ann Croghan’s wedding gown is complete. As you could see in my last post, things were winding down last weekend. The skirt decoration was finished, the dress was shaped like a dress, the lining was in, but there was still a ways to go.

As you may remember from my first post about this project, the sleeves were inspired by these from an original 1822 wedding gown:

I had been putting them off for three weeks, but everything else was done, and and it was time to face the sleeves.

The first step was to cut out the pieces. The white piece is a bit larger than the blue so that it can get gathered in the center. I carefully drew and cut out the teardrop shapes so that the blue would show through.

But, of course, when you cut a bunch of holes in your fabric, you have to do something to keep it from falling apart, so I bound the edges of the slashes in blue.

While that was a long and fiddly task, the tricky part was doing the little button loops that contain the excess fabric between each set of slashes.

First I used the extra bias strips that didn’t go into binding the slashes and made little flat cords, like spaghetti straps.

Then I covered some little buttons I had lying around with more of the blue fabric.

I attached each button to one of the fabric cords to make a loop.

Once those were done, I just wrapped them through the slashes, secured the button, arranged the extra fabric how I liked it, and stitched them in place.

When the sleeve pieces were sitting on the table after I’d cut them out, Brandon walked by and asked “What are those football things?”

“Sleeves.”

“No they’re not.”

“Seriously. I promise. They will one day look like sleeves!”

So I set out to prove that they would indeed, someday look like sleeeves. The first step was to gather the lower part of the sleeve into the sleeve band, then to sew the underarm seam to form a ring. (No picture of that since I figured you’d seen enough pictures of me sewing a seam that could or could not be the one I was talking about).

And then to fold under the sleeve binding and stitch it in place to create a nice edge. See? Now they look like sleeves (sort of). It’s easy to forget how bizarre pattern pieces look unless you know what you’re looking at.

Here’s what I get for doing things out of the natural order. I had to wrestle with the entire heavy dress while I gathered the sleeves onto the bodice and stitched them in place. But look how pretty! The puffs are longer and the extra fabric in the center a bit less than in the inspiration, but I’ll take it!

But puffs weren’t the only part of the sleeves! I used the white fabric with no blue underneath to create the rest of the sleeve, so that it would be a little sheer, and stitched it to the inside of the sleeve band on the puff.

As we all know, every wedding dress could use more lace! So I added some at the cuff and sleeve band.

We’re down to the smallest finishing touches now!

Buttons and buttonholes.

Hemming the blue underskirt.

That’s it! With that final anticlimactic and interminable seam, I was finished! The height of the skirt back may need a bit of adjustment once I’ve completed my corded petticoat and tried it on, but here it is!

Once again, I couldn’t have done this without help from some fantastic ladies! I can’t wait to show you all the rest of the outfit as it comes together (or maybe I’ll make you wait until July to see it all together!). If you possibly can, don’t forget to come to the Locust Grove Historic Picnic on July 18th. You’ll get to see the dress in action at a period ceremony, plus lots of other fun stuff including dancing, a reading by the Kentucky Shakespeare Company and much more!

You can also read about the making of the chemisette! And the veil!

Thanks for watching!

Hannah

To see the entire finished ensemble, click here!

The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 3: Poof? Puff? Pouf?

Welcome back to the story of the 1822 wedding dress for the wedding of Ann Croghan and Thomas Jesup at Historic Locust Grove–if you haven’t read parts 1 & 2, please check them out!

My big triumph for the beginning of the week was getting all of those pintucks done!

Once I was down to the final cluster, I took a pintuck vacation to sew the waistband onto the bodice. It was important to do this before I completed the last few pintucks, because I could then hem the skirt, pin it to the bodice and try it on to test the length. Good thing I did, too, because I ended up only needing two more pintucks, instead of four! (After another look at my research images, I realized it should be a bit longer than I had originally planned for).

Getting closer! It’s pretending to be all one piece!

But an end to pintucks didn’t mean an end to skirt decoration. I still had an uphill slog before the skirt was ready to go. What more fiddly bits could it possible need, you ask? Why the poofs of course! Every bride needs her fair share of over-the-top accents.

Like all ruffle-related accents, they took up more time than seemed necessary, but I gave myself three days, including an entire Saturday, to work on them. Each one started with a band of fabric nearly twice as big around as the actual skirt. The worst part about ordinary ruffles is that you have to hem the darn things, and hemming 145 inches of fabric for each ruffle is no picnic. Luckily, no hems were needed here. Instead, each piece had to be creased under, then get a gathering stitch along both edges. Thank you again to Judy and Heather, who got two thirds of that pain in the butt done for me!

I divided each poof into quarters to make it easier to gather evenly, and put them on the skirt one quarter at a time. Each quarter was pinned into its section of skirt, gathered to fit, pinned to within an inch of its life and stitched. The real majesty of the poof doesn’t show until you pull out the gathering stitches.

Finished poof on the left, next prepared section on the right.

Saturday morning, Brandon and I went on a great hike (the first one since his surgery, and he says he wants to keep doing it!), rewarded ourselves with ice cream, and then I settled down to this for the rest of the day:

Okay, okay, I tell a lie, I actually settled down to this:

No, this is not the first time I’ve watched the whole thing in one sitting.

Two down, one to go.

After sixteen hours (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) of gathering, pinning and sewing, all three poofs were present and accounted for:

Removing all of the blue marks. Scared the cats to death.

Finally, finally, finally, the skirt is finished!!! Time to move on to more exciting things!

Lest you were afraid there wasn’t enough lace going on with this wedding dress, here I am tacking some all around the neckline so that it will form an adorable ruffle once the lining is sewn in.

I spent a lot of my lining-sewing time holding the project up to the light to make sure the lace was laying correctly. The last thing I wanted was to have to tear part of it out to fix something. Huzzah for sheer fabrics!

And this is why you check and check and check… because when you turn everything around and press it, the lace is all pretty and perfect! And guess what? This is the LAST photo of the bodice all by itself!

Yes, indeed! Time at last to add a placket to the skirt and gather the skirt into the waistband! There was so much fabric to gather into just a couple of inches on each side of the skirt back, I was almost afraid it wasn’t going to fit. But I crammed it all in there and managed to get a needle through it and, at long last, the dress is all one piece!

The short sleeves in the picture are just my shift sleeves showing, they’ll be all covered up when I get the real sleeves in. I’m thrilled with how the color looks. It’s hard to tell in the pictures, but you can really see the blue through the white, and it makes a really nice effect on the ruched front and between the poofs on the skirt.

Now just to make those lovely sleeves and add a few finishing touches–see you next week for (fingers crossed) the final installment!

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel!

Hannah

You can read all about finishing the wedding gown in The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 4!

The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 2: It Takes a Village

Brandon and I have been talking this weekend about how glad we are that we moved to Louisville (nearly two years ago–I can hardly believe that!). Since we got down here, we’ve found a wonderful circle of friends, we both have jobs we enjoy, and we’ve discovered a hobby that takes up much of our free time. The friends and the hobby really go together a lot of the time, as was shown last Saturday, when the ladies of Locust Grove’s costumed interpreter corps (and a few others besides) rallied at my house for a tea party/day of stitching on Ann Croghan’s wedding dress. I couldn’t have done this without them. The dress is still a work in progress, but I can’t believe how much we’ve gotten done.

I spent last Friday night and Saturday morning preparing snacks and making sure everything was ready to be sewn, then threw my doors open to all and sundry. This including cutting each piece of the dress out of both white Swiss and light blue lawn. In the finished dress, the Swiss will be layered over the lawn so that just the barest blush of blue shows through.

Amy creating the incredible ruched, lacy panel for the bodice front:

Amy spent most of the day working on this, and it’s so stunning. I should have kept track of how much time she spent carefully arranging those gathers so that they fell perfectly (the white piece of the front had to gather down onto a blue piece that was cut to the actual pattern specs).

Brandon’s mom, Judy, even came down from Michigan to help–and brought the most delicious lemon bars I’ve ever tasted. Seriously. Be jealous. She also gets brownie points (or are they lemon bar points?) for her nonstop help in the kitchen Saturday morning, and her insistence on doing the dishes throughout the day. My house would have been such a disaster without her. Here are she and Heather working on basting each white bodice piece to the corresponding blue bodice piece, and assembling as much of the bodice as could be assembled before the front panel was finished. (Wish I’d gotten a less glare-y picture of them, but hey, the Sun, what can you do?)

Here’s Heather gathering lace for the front (her daughter Jos helped too, and got to practice her hand sewing, but I somehow missed getting of a picture of her with a needle in her hand):

Photo Credit on this one to Amy Liebert! Jos and I also got to chat about books, which was awesome. One of the things I miss most about working at a bookstore is getting to talk about books with awesome kids like her!

Despite her avowed lack of ability to sew, Marrie created my test poof for the skirt, so that we could figure out how wide they needed to be and how much gathering was required:

Once we had measurements for the poofs, Judy cut them out, and she and Heather (with help from Jos) assembled them–there will be three big rows of poof on the skirt, and each one had to be sewn together from several shorter strips, creased along the long edges, and gathered.Amy being the pressing queen:

Don’t forget, boys and girls, always press your seams as you go!

On Saturday morning, we had nothing but a bunch of pieces of fabric and at the end of the day:

I know it doesn’t look very blue there, but here it is next to a white piece of the skirt:

Lest you think I spent the whole day telling minions what to do while eating bonbons, here’s my project for the day (and beyond)–miles and miles of hand-sewn tucks on the skirt. Ok, so it’s not really miles, but it is over 100 feet total. I still have the last group of four to do before I’m done and get to start stitching the poofs into those empty spaces between them!

Basically, what I’m saying is that I have some awesome people in my life. I had so much fun on Saturday, and I’m inexpressibly grateful to everybody who came and helped! I can’t even describe the tortured mental state that I would have been in without them. I can’t wait to see the finished product!

Now, back to work,

Hannah

Read about the beginning of this project, and the research that goes into creating a period costume in The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 1.

Or continue on to The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 3!

The Wedding of Miss Croghan, Part 1: Research and Patterning

Sometimes you get to be part of a project so incredible that it just takes multiple blog posts to do it justice.

The Costumed Interpreter corps at Locust Grove is growing and growing, and this year we’re trying out something new. At the Historic Timeline Picnic each July, we will be presenting a reenactment outside of our normal 1816 scope–something really interesting that happened at Locust Grove that we wouldn’t usually get to show people. For the first year, we settled on Ann Croghan’s wedding to Thomas Jesup in 1822. Working outside of 1816 presents plenty of challenges, first and foremost, that people playing central roles need new clothing for the new time period, and have to be willing to spend time and money on an outfit that they may not get another chance to wear.

I was asked to play Ann back in January, and, being me, jumped at the chance to create a dress in a not-often-done period. And after several months of searching for a willing Jesup, guess who’s pretending to marry me in July? Brandon. Several people have threatened to become ordained ministers in order to turn our fake wedding into a real one in a romantic-comedy-like switch.

But back to the dress. Wedding dresses in the early nineteenth century weren’t the bedazzled evening gowns we often think of today, but they were special. White, while a common color, was not compulsory. I spent the first few months after being cast doing research and planning what I wanted my outfit to look like.

One of the most noticeable differences between 1816 and 1822 are the waistlines–in 1816, the empire waist had reached its highest point, which dropped rapidly over the next five years until it settled about halfway between the natural waist and the underbust. Skirts became more bell-shaped, and sleeves and hem decoration continued to grow. This is the transitional aesthetic between the Regency period and the Romantic. I looked at all sorts of dresses, but kept my biggest influences to actual wedding dresses and wedding fashion plates.

The wedding dress of Mrs. Peder Hjort, 1822, Denmark.

This dress was my single biggest influence, I took the hem decoration and bodice front directly from it. I did want to tweak the shape a bit, though, to really highlight the differences between strictly Regency fashion, and this transitional period. I added a waistband to emphasize the lower waistline, and widened the hem to be more bell-like. It’s very likely that the dress above would have a better shape if it had been displayed with a petticoat or two underneath, which Mrs. Hjort would have worn.

This 1822 dress from the Musées Royeaux des Art et Histoire shows the shape I’m hoping to achieve.

The only other thing about Mrs. Hjort’s wedding dress that I wanted to change was those sleeves. I mean come on. I like some froof, but those were a bit much. I used the sleeve cap detail, but made the design more streamlined by adding plain long sleeves underneath.

To get the idea of what a full wedding ensemble might have looked like, I turned to fashion plates.  These two from the Journals des Dames et des Modes were very helpful, the first is from 1820, the second from 1823. I would not normally use any resource from after 1822, but you can see that the basic ensemble doesn’t change much. I wish I could have found a wedding plate from 1822, but no luck there. These two plates are a great illustration of how quickly the hems were widening and waistlines dropping, because the two outfits are very similar except those minor changes in shape. The only other major difference is that the 1823 fashion called for long sleeves, and the 1820 for short. I wish I knew which was most fashionable in 1822, but I have seen extant examples with both. These plates were a bit of a sigh of relief, because they show that veils styled around elaborate hairstyles were the fashion which means I don’t have to build a new bonnet for the event!

So once I had all this research done, it was time to put it all together, and I came up with this sketch. I know it’s a bit hard to see, but you can get the basic idea.

To turn this vision into a reality, I started with my Sensibility Regency Dress Pattern (as I so often do), and then changed everything about it. I find that it’s easier to start with a jumping off pattern, even if almost nothing about the dress will remain the same. At least I know that pattern fits me.

Dropping the waistline was no big deal, I just needed to lengthen each piece following the shape of my body. The biggest alteration was in the bodice front. I had to turn the single-piece front that gathers into the waist into a three-piece front in order to create that lovely ruched and ruffled detail in the center. This involved making a mockup of the longer bodice, then putting it on, pinning and marking where the new seam would go, and removing the extra fabric that would have been gathered in. This picture shows what the shapes of the new pattern pieces would be.

The back also needed some tweaking. I wanted a flat back, not a gathered one like in Mrs. Hjort’s dress at the beginning of this post. I was able to look at pictures of the backs of several 1822 gowns and spencers, and the center back pieces were much narrower at the bottom than my pattern was, creating almost a V-shape from shoulder to center-back. I had to adjust the shapes of the back and side-back pieces in order to achieve this look, then make a new mockup to check the fit of all my new pattern pieces. Poor Brandon got to pin me in and help adjust the fit where I couldn’t reach, but I think he’s gotten over the trauma (I can be a bit particular about my sewing…). I didn’t take pictures of the skirt adjustments because frankly, adding extra width to a hem is not terribly exciting.

Here are the final bodice pieces, plus a cat tail for good measure. (I did make a few more small adjustments after I made the lining, but nothing major.)

Construction on the dress has now begun, and more posts will follow soon! (Did I mention it’s all being done by hand?) Time to dive in to glorious period detail and hours and hours worth of pin-tucks.

Stay tuned!

Hannah

P.S. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come–I have amazing friends! You can read part two here.