"To be honest, I don't know if I will ever make an entire ensemble by hand..."

I wrote that highly pessimistic prediction in a post here almost exactly a year ago.  And since then, I've made not one, but TWO gowns entirely by hand!  I've documented the process of making both of these gowns pretty thoroughly on Facebook, but I wanted to consolidate it all in one place so it's easier to see how everything went from start to finish.

First things first though - I realized I never actually posted pictures of the altered Uniquely You dress form here.  I cut and shaved off the gigantic pointy boobs, and replaced them with a pair of tights filled with lentils to make them squishable, more like actual breast tissue.  Here's the dress form with my stays on it, which is laced so that it has the same measurements that I have in stays:

This means that I can drape and pin onto the form and be pretty confident that whatever I've draped will also fit me when I'm laced in.

Here is the other main undergarment I made for this particular gown, a set of hooped panniers.  One could also use pocket hoops, which are separate and tie together at front and back, but I had the pattern for the single wide hoop as part of the pattern packet that came with the very first gown I made (, so I thought I'd give it a try.  These aren't nearly as wide as some fancy court gowns could get - it's a nice, formal width but not extreme.  It may be a little hard to see, but the front ties wrap around to tie at the back and the back ones come around to tie at the front, leaving an opening on either side to reach through to the pockets, which are worn tied around the waist just over the stays.

Here's a kind of artsy picture I took looking down into the pannier, showing the ties added to the front and back on the inside that help it maintain that oval shape:

These are boned with very long cable ties.  I poked holes in the ends and overlapped them and took a few stitches through the two layers to give each rib a little more strength:

Here is the back pleating in progress.  If I were really having this dress made by a mantua-maker to my specific body, the silk would have been pinned to me in my stays and pleated exactly to fit.  But the pattern I used for this gown (this one, from Larkin & Smith, which is essentially a dressmaking workshop you can purchase) still gives a pretty exact fit by designating the width of the back panel to cut for your personal measurements, and providing this pleating guide. 

Here I'm checking the mockup of the sleeve to make sure the fullness will pleat nicely towards the back.

I made the sleeves before finishing the back so that they'd just be ready to stitch on as soon as the bodice and skirts were done.  I don't have many pictures of the sleeve construction since I was making them while riding the train from DC to New York, but I will look for one and update this post.

UPDATE!  Here is a picture of one of the sleeves in progress - and yes, it's on the little pull-down tray on the train.  When I was working on sewing together the skirt panels (which is not interesting at all, just a lot of combination stitching down the entire length) I actually snagged a seat in the cafe car.  It was a late-night train so not a lot of people were eating, and I got a whole table to myself!!  It was awesome!

It's a little hard to tell here, but you might be able to see how one side of the linen lining is folded back, away from the silk on the inside (it's secured with a pin, in the far left of the above picture).  The seam allowance on the straight edge of the silk is folded under and stitched down to the other side, through both the silk and linen lining.  Then, the whole thing gets turned inside out, and the seam allowance of the remaining linen edge is turned under and whipped down only to the other side of the lining, not through all layers.  It's very elegant in that it hides all of the raw edges but maintains the clean appearance of the outer seam.  

About one inch of both the silk and linen are stitched independently of each other at the sleeve edge so that they can be turned inward and secured using point a rabattre sous la main, also known as the "underhand hem stitch" in the L&S booklet.  Here's what that looks like:

And here's video of me demonstrating this seam: 

Now we get to the body of the gown!  The bodice lining pieces, which had been fitted to me by my friend Jillian Henning, are used to guide the way the outer fabric is cut so that you know the final piece will fit the body perfectly.  

After pinning down the pleats twice or three times to get them just right, I pinned the back lining to the silk, and cut away the excess silk around it.  That part was terrifying!!

Here's the back with the pleats stitched down from the outside, which also secures the lining to the silk.  It's really quite clever how each step actually accomplishes several things.  

Side bodice pieces sewn on.  This is another example where the construction is really quite different from modern sewing.  Instead of being placed right sides together and the seam stitched, the seam allowances on the side bodice pieces are turned under, and they're stitched down onto the back bodice pieces.   

Pleating the skirts!  Two full widths of the fabric went into each side of the skirt, so all of that had to be pleated in to meet up more or less at the edge of the bodice front.  It can mostly be done by eye, but of course I'm a perfectionist, and I pleated and re-pleated the skirt probably three or four times so that it lined up "just so" with the bodice.  There's a pocket slit in there, and if you look carefully, you can see that the pleats are oriented to go towards the pocket slit.  From the spot where the skirt starts at the center back, the pleats are stacked so that the folded part faces to the left, and then past the pocket slit, the folded part faces to the right.

Once I was *finally* happy with the skirt pleats, I stitched the bodice over them from the outside.  This is yet another way that shows how much you literally build these gowns by piling things on top of each other and just stitching them down.  It's completely period-appropriate for those stitches to show.  In modern construction we feel like we have to hide everything and make things completely tidy and pretty, but in extant gowns a lot of that work is unabashedly visible.

But (and there's always a but!) just like with the sleeves, the side bodice linings are added in such a way that the stitches don't show on the outside.  The seam allowances are folded under and the pieces are whip stitched only to the side back lining, without going through the silk.  I'm not sure why that is, but the costume historians' mantra is "never say never and never say always!"

The linen linings for the straps are stitched to the bodice lining pieces and then the gown is placed on the wearer (or in this case, the dress form) so that the sleeves can be attached.  

The sleeves are fitted and often attached, or at least basted, "in situ" so you can be really sure of the fit over the shoulder.  

The flaps that come over the sleeve head and get stitched down to the linen strap linings are called robings, and the piece that covers the raw edge at the top of the bodice and gets folded in is called the back facing.  Again, note how they are just kind of stacked over each other and stitched down.  The fact that every construction step shows in the finished garment is actually much more elegant to me than a piece where everything is buried in the inside and you can't tell how it's made.  It brings the process to life and emphasizes the individual wearer's unique body, and gives you an appreciation for the work involved.

The robings come all the way down and not only cover the raw edges, they hide the pinning that holds the garment closed over the stomacher.  These clothes rarely had "permanent" fastenings because a woman's body would go through many changes over the course of her life, with pregnancies and weight fluctuations from her menstrual cycle.  Being able to pin a garment slightly larger or smaller was a welcome feature when fabric was expensive and a woman might have only a few gowns in her wardrobe.

Here the back facing is folded over and stitched down to the inside.  

Here's the robing stitched down over the sleeve head and strap lining.  The order in which the facing and robings are stitched down, as well as the shapes created in the back, vary among extant gowns, so I just went with what was aesthetically pleasing to me.

Once the main body of the gown was complete, I moved on to the petticoat!  Unlike what we normally think of as a petticoat (an undergarment that provides warmth and/or support and fullness for the main gown), this is a decorative petticoat that is meant to be seen where the gown opens in the front.  Of course there are other underlayers worn with these gowns that are called petticoats, because costuming terms are confusing!  Yay!

I did a foolish thing and cut the silk oddly when I was making the main gown, so for the petticoat I was left with one full width at the right length, and a full width at a length that was too short.  So I had to do some piecing, and then I had to do more piecing on top of that.  But thankfully that could be the back panel of the petticoat and not show.  You see this in extant garments all the time, and they didn't even really bother with matching grainlines or even design motifs.  Like I said, we're much more conscious of things looking "pretty" nowadays than they were.  Fabric was expensive, and likely imported or woven by hand, so there was only so much yardage.  If you (or your Mantua-Maker) cut it wrong, you couldn't very well buy more, so you just made do!

Here's the petticoat mounted on the dress form, and yeah, you can see the seam where I pieced it, but like I said, it's in the back and it'll be completely covered by the gown.  Tra-la!

Front

      Back

The petticoat is shaped to hang evenly over the panniers in a really clever way.  The two panels are just cut as widths of fabric with straight edges at the bottom, and you get the longer length over the sides by folding down the fabric in the middle of the top edge and gradually decreasing the fold out to the edges, then pleating it up and attaching ties.  So you've drawn up the middle to be shorter and essentially left the sides the original length, and you don't have to have to try to hem an uneven bottom edge.  It's brilliant!

The petticoat is also an adjustable garment, and like the panniers, the front ties go around to the back and the back ties come around to the front.  And there's still that handy-dandy opening to reach into one's pockets.

Here's the stomacher, which is just a piece of the silk stacked over a piece of identical linen, the seam allowances folded in and the whole thing edge stitched.

The stomacher is sadly unembellished right now, but here's a picture of an extant stomacher that I'm going to use as my inspiration for this one:

Here's one of the sleeve ruffles in the process of being whip-gathered to fit the sleeve opening.

Aaaand...the mostly-finished gown!!

This hem is so awful, but I'm sharing it because sometimes costuming is quick-and-dirty, get-it-out-the-door-I'll-fix-it-later!!

So, that's the olive green taffeta robe a l'anglaise!!  I kept hoping to finish it in time for various events, and I just kept on missing those deadlines!!  Having a few other gowns I could wear made it hard to feel a sense of urgency.  Then I was invited to a house party given by Carolyn Dowdell (The Modern Mantua-Maker), a researcher and historical costumer originally from Canada, who was unfortunately moving back home after about four years in DC.  She's really quite high-profile in historical sewing circles, and she had become known for throwing these awesome themed costume parties in her gorgeous house, so for the final hurrah, she declared a free-for-all, any period, any style, so I said, okay, this time I mean it, I'm wearing the olive green anglaise to this party!!

These two photos were taken during the party by Mike and Gloria of In The Long Run Designs.

The party was back in June, and I must confess, this gown is still not really complete - the sleeves need one more taffeta ruffle and a gathered band, plus organza ruffles; I need to embellish the stomacher; and I need to fix the janky hem that I did in a hurry.  I have several perfectly good excuses for not having finished it yet, including 1) immediately diving head-first into the making of the next gown, and 2) Jane Austen Festival, for which I decided to make Ziva her own little Regency gown to wear (which was totally worth it, because she loved it and looked adorable).

Overall I'm very, very happy with this gown and really proud of myself.  I learned SO MUCH in the process of making it, and I can honestly say that I did every single stitch on it myself, completely by hand.  I found that concept quite daunting when I first set out to do it, and it took me a really long time because I was learning as I went and I'm just a very impatient seamstress, but breaking it down into bite-size projects, taking parts of it with me when I traveled, and just seeing it all come together was extremely rewarding.  Having a truly authentic ensemble to wear as Abigail, and to understand even just a fraction of what dressmaking and the wearing of clothes looked like and felt like in the 18th century, makes me a better interpreter, and makes for a better experience for my audiences.

Next post: the LACMA purple and white striped gown!!