18th century saree round gown

I've often used vintage sarees for my costuming projects, here's yet another one. I bought the saree earlier this year with this one and it's been sitting in the cupboard, waiting for the opportune sewing project to come along.

I decided to make an 18th century roundgown, mainly because the saree had a gorgeously embroidered pallu end and I wanted to make the most of it.

I used the round gown in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion as guidelines and used my anglaise bodice lining pattern as the bodice pattern for this gown too. I would have wanted to make another en fourreau gown, but due to the fact that I was working with a saree, I could not have cut the en fourreau back out of it. I opted for making the bodice and the hem separately and joining them in the end. I didn't really like that and still think that an en fourreau back would've looked better. Ah, well.

The fabric was annoying to work with, it's very drapey, soft and--I'm now convinced--part liquid. Also, the metal embroidery is fairly heavy and while that's nice on the finished gown, while sewing it added a level of difficulty.  I lined the bodice with cotton and bound all the edges with bias tape inside the bodice to give it a modicum of stability. The hem was scream-inducingly hard to pleat and level (due to fabric quality and that metal embroidery) and I actually ended up asking help from Sanna (Rococo Atelier ) and other friends in attaching the hem to the bodice before the Christmas ball in Suomenlinna where I first wore it.

I trimmed the gown with gold lace, which is probably not as common as white lace in extant gowns but I managed to find some examples browsing different museum databases.

After the Christmas ball I realised that I didn't have any good photos of the gown so today I decided to dress up and snapped a couple.

A motivation boost gown

The red Regency gown is finished! I felt like sewing something easy and something that I absolutely know how to do while gathering motivation and momentum (and more information) to continue with the Courtois dress.
This was a straightforward project as Regency dresses tend to be. I love working with sarees because there is such a variety available and the colours and the decorations are gorgeous. Also, if you buy them used, they're a bargain. I mean where else could you get 6 metres of finely embroidered fabric with 20-30 euros the lot?
I used my standard Regency bodice, cut the hem as a big rectangle so there is only one seam at the centre back, and made puff sleeves. I was going for the 1810s look with this gown, with the big sleeves, vibrant colour and no train ( because I want to be able to dance wearing this dress!). I added a decorative, gathered strip of fabric on the neckline and sewed on it some of the beads I detached from the only bit of the saree that was a bit damaged. Everything is handsewn as usual. I'm very happy with the gown!

There are 4 pairs of hooks and eyes to attach the dress but I could only bend my arms to close the top and bottom ones. The maid's still on holiday :)

I really like the hem embroidery.

I tried something new with my hair and had a matching (yes, it matches the embroidery colours!) scarf to tie as a turban.

I may have been a bit bad...

I bought two vintage sarees. Considering that I haven't been exactly rolling in money so far this year and meeting the expenses each month is a bit of a balancing act, maybe buying supplies to cater for my costuming habit is not entirely sensible. But I did do the math first and being vintage they were cheap, not to mention gorgeous. AND I already know exactly what I want to make out of them.

Pictures? Yes, I thought so too :)

I really like the colour and the embroideries! The colour is actually a bit deeper, raspberry red.

There's metallic and colour embroidery, pearls and the saree is liberally sprinkled with gold sequins

This is going to be my new Regency ball gown

The second saree is creamy white and almost butter cream colour in places. This is the gorgeously embroidered pallu end of the saree.

The embroidery is done in metal bullion and there's a row of rhinestones on the pallu edge

This is going to be ca. 1780 round gown. The pallu end will be the skirt front piece.

The Other Saree

As you might remember, I originally bought two sarees for my Regency dress projects but as fate would have it, I ended up making something completely different out of them. The first, yellow one became a 20s dress and I'm still very pleased with it. The second saree was (possibly) silk blend fabric, and embroidered in the traditional Indian kantha style, which is, in the lack of a better word, rather rustic. So it really didn't look like Regency dress material.
Instead, I made it into a petticoat and a caraco jacket, á la 18th century. I modified my black print jacket pattern (originally from the Costume Close-up book) and did some piecing and fiddling and managed to put together the jacket out of the more densely embroidered pallu end of the saree. The petticoat is a bog-standard 18th century skirt, nothing interesting going on there; happily I was able to cut the petticoat so that the nice embroidered border of the saree fell on the petticoat hem.
The jacket closes with three horizontal straps, each on opposite side from the others. I was inspired by the beautiful caraco in V&A and the strap-fronted pierrot in the Cut of Women's Clothes book.

The saree before cutting

Close-up of the embroidery

The middle part of the saree is really lighter than the pallu end and the edges. I've been looking at so many sarees lately that I can say with confidence that this is typical for many sarees. I'm not sure why, exactly, but there are a lot of sarees dyed like this out there. The entire jacket came out of the more densely embroidered bit. I wanted to use the border on jacket edges, which meant that I had to do some piecing to make that happen around the curving hem of the jacket. Also, I had to cut the other sleeve in two pieces to be able to cut it out of the embroidered piece.

My hand as a scale to show how big the flowers are.

I like how the jacket hem spreads out over the bumroll.

I still need to sew in hooks to attach the straps. Here they're only pinned and a bit crooked at that.

The stomacher

The jacket hem forms a complete circle when it is laid flat.

I faced the edges with leftover fabric from the inside because I didn't have enough seam allowances just to turn the lining and the jacket fabric in.

I'm not dead!

I've only been busy with studying and stuff. I have nothing to post about yet, but I'm soon hoping to finish the petticoat and caraco combination I'm making out of the other saree I bought. The saree was a vintage one, like the yellow saree, and the colour is strong reddish orange. The saree is embroidered in the traditional kantha style and I think it sort of works for 18th century styles. I'm not sure what the fabric is exactly but I would guess silk blend. But no pictures until I've finished it!

Instead, here's a couple of photos of a shawl I spruced up with block printing. The shawl is cotton, a flea market find and I hand printed the motifs with my lovely Indian block prints. So, a paisley shawl on a budget, one might say :)

A vintage saree and what happened to it...

About 2 weeks ago I searched Etsy for suitable sarees for my costuming projects and found and ordered two. The other one arrived surprisingly quickly and even though I had first intended to use both the sarees for making more Regency gowns, the garment started to look more and more like 20s flapper dress material.
The saree in question was lemon yellow chiffon, the borders embroidered with metallic yarn, beads and sequins and the pallu end of the saree had beautiful flower and vines embroidery with more sequins and beads. After some sketches and browsing through a ton of pictures of extant 20s gowns I settled on a shape. 20s dresses can be cut very simple and made to look very elaborate or vice versa. I wanted to have a simple design but still something more than a plain sheath dress, so I deviced a pattern which is loosely based on the 1925 Vionnet dress in Janet Arnold's patterns of fashion. The dress only has a front and back piece and they are exactly the same.

The dress piece. The horizontally wide part is the hem and the cut creates the nice hanging pointy things on each side.

I wanted to use the flowery bit at the front of the dress. Luckily it was about 110cm wide, exactly the right lenght for my dress.

The rest of the saree was scattered with these little leaf motifs.

 

I was very lucky to find fabric for the underdress. Since the saree is chiffon (aka. veeery see-through) the dress needed an underlayer. Miracle of miracles, I managed to bag this viscose fabric, and the colour matches the saree perfectly!

First I sewed the underdress pieces together and hemmed them. I then cut, sewed and hemmed the chiffon pieces. The front piece of the dress needed some piecing, because I wanted to use the flowery bit for the centre front, I needed to cut the side hem pieces separately and sew them on the centre piece. The back piece is all one piece. Because chiffon frays like crazy, I sewed double seams everywhere. I then joined the underdress and the chiffon dress at the neck line. I tried to join the chiffon dress shoulders at first, but it pulled the bodice too high on my neck and it just looked stupid, so I chose to align the top edges of the chiffon dress with the neck edge of the underdress.
The chiffon dress is slightly longer than the underdress and this gives me the opportunity to pull it up a bit with a long sash of the same chiffon fabric (basically all the rest of the saree left over). Here are some pictures I took today, complete with my attempts on 20s hair and makeup.

My make-up skills are practically nonexistent; I never really learned when I was a teenager...

A sudden fit of vampiness.

I still had a smaller piece of the saree left, so it became a head scarf.