Last week I showed you a very embellished (and everything elsed) yellow ballgown from 1889.  You were a little confused by the bodice design – and you weren’t the only one.  The Met couldn’t decide which was the front and which was the back either.  A few of you loved it, but most of you felt that there was just too much embellishment, and too many different kinds of embellishment, and it came in at a rather disappointing 6 out of 10. This week, since it is the Embellishment challenge on the Historical Sew Fortnightly, I’m going to risk it and post another heavily embellished dress, this one from a decade before the  yellow ballgown.  Like the ballgown, this afternoon/dinner dress is monocolour and has a variety of different kinds of trim: beading, ruching, buttons, bows, ruffles and pleats, arranged asymmetrically around the dress. What do you think?  Does this frock manage to harmonise all its different embellishments more successfully than last week’s frock?  Or is it another example of too much, with too little …

Last week you were firmly in two camps about Worth Jr’s Arabian escape – either you loooooved it, or were really quite indifferent.  As happens when there are distinctly divided groups, the actual rating is a score that few gave the dress: 8.6 out of 10.  It’s certainly a step up for JP! As long as we’re being brave, how about something a bit brighter?  This English dress from 1872-75 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art combines lilac, palest spring green, with touches of vivid orange in a meticulously trimmed dress.  Quite unusual! As often happens, how we read the colours depends on lighting.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which option is closer to the real thing, and if you like either. The touches of orange in the trim seem quite random until you see a detail of the dress: Then it becomes obvious that the dressmaker carefully picked out the colour of the small orange flowers in the lilac silk, and referenced it in the trim. What do you think?  Was …