Lately, we’ve been on a big push to expand our wardrobe collection and in particular, 1870s and 1880s styles that can be used for both background as well as for principal characters. Because these are all day dresses, the basic fabric we’re using is cotton, either in stripes or small irregular patterns such as florals and plants. In some instances, we are also using silk taffeta for accent. In this example, the base fabric is a light blue cotton with an old gold/chartreuse floral pattern. For accent, we used a dark gold/chartreuse (depending on the light) silk taffeta for accents on the front and sleeve cuffs.
Here’s a close-up for constructing revers to be inserted on the fronts:
The green silk chartreuse velvet was a real pain to work with- it was constantly migrating and it took a lot of pins and basting stitches to keep everything in place. Below are close-ups of the sleeve construction:
It looks simple but there were a lot of steps involved, each requiring exacting attention to detail and taking a long time. In a future post, we’ll show more so stay tuned.
