All posts tagged: 1780s

Rate the dress: late Rococo ruffles

Reminder: Two days left to enter the giveaway if you haven’t already. OK, back to regular programming: Talk about drama! Turns out a lot of you like it – the extremely dramatic pink and black dress had a lot of enthusiastic responses, and a few slightly horrified and repelled erks from those with more delicate taste in clothes. Definitely not a dress for the faint-hearted! Thanks to the non-lovers of huge hot pink & black chevrons (and those who noticed that the cuffs were a bit off, and the dress fell apart stylistically below the knee), it came in at 7.3 out of 10. Sometimes a ‘Rate the Dress’ chooses itself, and sometimes I have the hardest time picking a garment that is interesting and doesn’t repeat the theme/colour/timeperiod/aesthetic of something I showed you recently too closely. This week was dreadful. I looked at hundreds of images, and saw many that would be perfect Rate the Dresses, but weren’t right for this week. I finally settled on this: This gown fascinates me. I think how …

Pet-en-l’aire magnificence

Published by The Dreamstress

I still can’t get over how many good shots Theresa and I got from our photoshoot at the old Dominion Museum, and how spectacular Theresa looks in all of them. Her face just changes from frame to frame, meaning that I ended up with dozens of photos with almost the same pose, but, oh, what a different mood! Hehe. Do you see it? All of these photos were taken from the balcony around the entrance hall of the old Dominion Museum. It’s such a great place to shoot – with balconies on both sides, you can get every angle, and lots of different kinds of light. I love how you can see the details of the side-pleat in these photos The only problem with these is her face is so amazing you hardly notice the outfit!

The compere front of the pet

Published by The Dreamstress

With the back of the pet draped, I tackled the false compere front. I mentioned previously that I wasn’t sure that sewing on the compere front as a false front, sewed on to a solid bodice piece, was accurate. I’m afraid I confused some of you, as you thought I wasn’t sure a compere front is accurate. I know the aesthetic is right, I’m just not sure my way of doing it (creating a solid bodice foundation, and just tacking on the fashion fabric piece as a false front) is historically accurate. Janet Arnold’s pattern for a compere front gown, based on this gown, has the dress and compere front made up completely separately, with the compere front sewn in last (almost as if if was a stomacher that was sewn in), and all the other examples of compere front garments where I can determine the construction seem to have been assembled this way. So, sigh. Mine may not be accurate. C’est la vie. I’ll get it right next time. I didn’t take pictures the …