Black & Gold 1870s Natural Form Dress

Black & Gold 1870s Natural Form Dress

Quite possibly my most sparkly dress to date! I had plans to attend a Victorian weekend at the end of February, which included a Saturday night ball. Having precisely zero ballgowns, and wanting to go 1870s natural form for the event I started digging around for inspiration and fabrics.

I ended up staring at a gold and white dress from The Age of Innocence film, and in my head it slowly transformed into a gold and black gown. I purchased a length of African George fabric, which is similar to sari fabric and has an embroidered hem, and a silk chiffon shot with a metallic pinstripe, and used some black taffeta and plain black satin from the stash to help supplement.

I started with a fairly simple skirt pattern from Peterson’s Magazine. This skirt comes from the 1877 edition of Peterson’s Magazine.

The initial draft was fine, but it seemed a bit slim over my very voluminous petticoat, so I compared the two patterns and ended up adding a few more inches to the center front and center back in order to fluff up the body of the skirt.

Once I was happy with the pattern, I cut the fashion skirt out of black taffeta, and the lining out of silver taffeta. Since I was flatlining the skirt, they would be treated as one layer while I worked.

I wanted to work out how the fan pleats worked in the back of the skirt, so I assembled the back panels first and futzed around with the pleats until I was able to make them work.

Then I went back and worked on the front of the skirt. I assembled the two front skirt panels, but left the skirt back on its own for the time being since it would be easier to embellish the front and back separately before sewing them together.

Before I began embellishing the front of the skirt, I added a 6-inch wide hem facing, which I stiffened with a layer of tarlatan. I wanted this so the ruffles at the hem would get a bit of support.

Then I moved on to making the ruffles for the front of the skirt. The plan was for one ruffle in black taffeta, edged with gold ribbon, and a wider ruffle of the metallic chiffon, also edged with ribbon.

The taffeta ruffle was first. The strips were cut, assembled, and hemmed, and then a 1/4-inch wide gold ribbon was stitched down along one edge.

Once all the pleats were in place, the strip was sewn onto the front of the skirt, and I moved on to making the chiffon ruffle. Because the chiffon was so slippery, I decided to give the entire length of fabric a light starch bath before even cutting anything out. It gave the fabric a bit more of a crisp hand, and kept the chiffon from creeping all over the place while I tried to work with it.

From there, it was basically the same process as before, except with way more spraying and pressing and pinning. The chiffon was very springy and didn’t want to hold a crisp pleat, and the ruffle was several inches wider than my pleating board, which required more steps to get the top and bottom edges to press cleanly. Eventually, though, I was able to get some nice, crisp, flat pleats into the chiffon.

Finally, I could start on the apron front. I cut a wide piece of my George fabric and draped it over the front of the skirt. I played with the positioning of some pleats to just give it a little bit of volume toward the bottom, and stitched those in place by hand once I was happy with how they looked. Then I cut two panels of the embroidered selvedge and used them as hip pieces that would frame the front panel.

Then it was time to return to the back of the skirt. The back panel finally got its hem facing, and then I started on the ruffles. The plan here was for two of the ribbon-edge taffeta ruffles, with a pouf of the embroidered satin up top, opening up in a fan that would end at the top edge of the hem pleats. So, more taffeta ruffles were made. Since the train is quite long, this ate up quite a bit of fabric!

To make the embroidered section of the skirt fan, I used the Peterson’s skirt pattern again, but I flipped it so the straight edge was against the finished hem of the fabric, and the curved edge was at the top. I also folded the pattern so that it was a good foot shorter, so it would lay right at the top of the ruffles and not obscure them.

I was a little stumped on what to do for the top half of the skirt back for a while. I didn’t have a lot of my embroidered satin left, and what I did have was in long, narrow cuts. I decided to make use of the remaining scalloped edge, and cut two 35-inch long pieces, which I pinned to the side-back seams and then pleated into a rounded shape. I had one 28-inch length piece left, which had no embroidered edges, so I placed that panel in the middle to give some additional fullness to the bustle pouf. It all turned out to be just enough fabric to make the back pouf, and I was very pleased with how it ended up looking.

At this point everything was just pinned together, so the next step was actually to carefully stitch this entire concoction together, which I did mostly by hand. Last but not least was to install a placket and waistband. Instead of going into the center back like I usually do, I put the placket/skirt opening on one of the side seams so it wouldn’t interfere with the bustle pouf in the back. The top edge of the back pouf extends a couple of inches over the placket and attaches with a snap, completely hiding the skirt opening.

I had been working on the skirt every spare moment hoping to give myself plenty of time to work on the bodice, but I still ended up in a time crunch, with only two weeks before the event to put something together. I decided that I wasn’t going to drape my own pattern, since that would require multiple fittings to get it just right, and instead decided to use Truly Victorian’s TV416, and just make a plain black satin bodice straight from the package. I did one mockup to adjust for size, since I know from experience that their patterns are always very wide in the shoulders and long in the waist on me, and then I dove in and began cutting out my final bodice.

I didn’t have any of the embroidered satin left which I could have finagled to give me plain bodice pieces, but I did have a bolt of black satin in my stash, so that’s what I ended up using. The two black colors are not quite a match, but luckily they’re close enough that it’s not super noticeable.

Even though it was a quick and plain bodice, I still wanted to construct and finish it well. There’s boning on the front darts, and I finished the top and bottom edges with a piped facing. I didn’t want to spend time making separate piping, so I sewed one edge of the facing in, placed some yarn between the facing and the seam allowance, and then stitched in the ditch to create the piping. And it worked well! Then I turned under the raw edge of the facing and hand-stitched it to the lining.

I did the bulk of the work on the bodice in the week leading up to the event, but, as is tradition, I was working on it at the last minute in the hotel room. I had to attach all the hooks for the closure and make all the thread bars, and I was sewing right up until about 10 minutes before we had to get ready and go!

But the dress was a success! I wore it to dinner and to the ball, where it performed beautifully while dancing.