Sewing an 1870s Ball Gown First Bustle Era Ensemble Part 3

If you've been watching any of my previous videos, you might know that I had been in the process of making an 1870s gown for the ball weekend in Bath. And at this point I finished the day dress, but I still had to make the ball gown. So I probably did hours of research on Pinterest, and these are just some of the fashion plates that I considered for inspiration, but in the end it came down to these three. As some of you might already know, this is the dress that I was basing my day dress off of, and then these fashion plates were the main inspiration for my ball gown. I really like how they used the bright pink underskirt and then added a more delicate white bodice and overskirt to that, which would be a lot more appropriate for a young lady like myself. For the skirt I'm basically using two rectangles, one shorter one for the front and a longer one with a slightly round hem to go in the back. I started out by making a mock-up from cotton, which then ended up being the lining of my ball gown bodice, which by the way is based on an original Victorian pattern, which I also found on Pinterest. And then I made the whole thing out of the white duchess satin, which I'm using. And the first thing obviously we had to do is to gather the back of my overskirt. I did that by sewing two lines of basting stitches across the waistline, and then gathering those before attaching the back of the overskirt to the back of the bodice, right sides facing. I did this by hand. The idea is that this whole thing ends up a sort of polonaise, so that the overskirt and the bodice one piece. And I did not attach the front of the bodice to the front of the apron, just because I will have to have a way to get in and out of it. The bodice will also be front closing instead of back, which will be a lot easier to put on. Next what I had to do is put on my bodice polonaise and figure out the draping on the skirt. To do that I simply put it on over my pink day skirt, which will form the base of my evening gown as well, except that I didn't put on the bustle just yet. So the first thing I needed to do was to add two pleats to the sides of the overskirt to make the waist fit. And then the next thing that I had to do was to just slightly lift the overskirt and pin and then sew in place to get that nice drapey effect, so that the overskirt is kind of held up at the sides. This is the length that I was going for and it will end up looking a little bit longer in the end, because I will be adding lace edging all around the edge of the overskirt. So this is what the whole thing looked like put together and now it's time for decoration. So I started by pleating a strip of pink satin and then attaching that to the neckline. This would be paired with a ruffle of white lace. Because the lace is very wide I decided to cut it in half for some more decoration and also to add another reference to the rococo period, which the 1870s were heavily inspired by, I decided to also make a couple of pink satin bows and attach them to the shoulders, to the front of the bodice and to the skirt. So that just adds a little bit of a cute detail. It was then time to gather the lace that would go around the bottom edge of my skirt. So again I did that by hand and then pinned that to the bottom edge of the skirt. I folded the wrong, I folded the raw edge of the overskirt over to the right side of the fabric as that would be hidden by the lace and then I would have one raw edge less to worry about. I then attached the lace at about two-thirds of its width and I initially thought that I would add a little bit of pink trim here or a ribbon to kind of have this double lace ruffle, but then I noticed that lace was actually dropping very prettily into a sort of double ruffle all by itself, so I decided to leave it at that. And here is a first picture of a try-on of the gown and then this is what the whole thing looked like at the ball. Obviously that would be a whole video for another day, so I will just leave you with this little clip and stay tuned because I've got lots of pictures and videos from the ball itself to share with you.