Remember how I said that the fabric for the 1813 Kashmiri dress wasn’t quite accurate? Well, I’ve done some more research, and it turns out it is more accurate than I thought. First, whilst I still can’t find an image of a dress made from a Kashmiri shawl that is darker than the cobalt blue of Salome’s  (and I still think that one is at least half fantasy, though there are extent cobalt blue shawls, and at least one extent shawl-inspired dress in cobalt blue), I have managed to find an extent paisley shawl that is black: It’s a European shawl in silk and cotton rather than a Kashmiri shawl in cashmere, and it’s from a few years older than my dress, but where there is one, there might have been more. And the border?  Well, my double border still doesn’t match any images of dresses made from paisley shawls or extent examples of dresses made from paisley shawls, but there are a number of extent shawls with very similar borders: If only my wool …

I know the 1813 Kashmiri dress is done, but I wanted to share some of the construction details to explain how I did it (and as a reference for anyone trying to make a similar dress). Today I’ll focus on the skirt construction. My skirt is based on two rectangles, each 136cm/55″ wide and 135cm/54″long as they were cut.  The skirt lost barely any width in the sewing, but has a very large hem and top turning, so the finished measurement is 133cm/52″ wide and Kashmiri shawls of the early 19th century are usually between 100-110″ long & 50-55″ wide, so my finished dress dimensions are an almost exact match to what a period seamstress would have been working with. The major change in design/fabric area is that I have an extra area of patterned fabric to construct the bodice out of, and don’t have the lovely narrow side borders to use as trim. Skirts based entirely on rectangles were very common in the first decade of the 19th century, but in the early 1810s …