Regency Mourning Gown

Regency fashion isn’t a style I particularly care for but as I have somewhere to wear it, the Jane Austen Festival Australia, I have made several regency dresses. I needed some evening wear for the festival and eventually I came across a fashion plate that I liked: a half-mourning gown from 1812.

I couldn’t find the fabric I wanted in Canberra and was nearly ready to settle for a too-heavy light blue fabric when, on a visit to Cootamundra and I found a lovely purple fabric which has a beautiful drape. I also found in Cootamundra the striped white for the sleeves and a textured white for the under-bodice.

I scaled up a pattern for a regency dress from The Cut of Women’s Clothes (I think it was diagram 37) by scanning the page and using a data projector to project the pattern onto paper so I could trace it at the size I wanted. I then adapted the pattern to make the dress from the fashion plate.

The white under-bodice is basically a rectangle sewn into the sleeve holes. The overbodice is secured to the underbodice in the front as well.

 The ribbon lines were sewn on by hand.

The dress does up in the back with hooks and loops. I usually wear it over a bodiced petticoat.With my other regency dresses I have gathered the skirts in the back but because this one was a bit fancier I decided to use pleating instead.

The fashion plate has a trim around the hem. Originally I tried to replicate this trim by gathering and twisting a long strip of fabric but it didn’t create the right effect. The first few times I wore it the dress was without trim, because I hadn’t worked out how to do it. I ended up making 50 florets from the same striped material as the sleeves and sewing these close together to form the trim.  I used this method for the florets:

Cut a circle of fabric

Use an anti-fraying agent around the edge

Sew gathering stitches around the edge and pull into the middle and secure

To attach to dress sew three beads over the gather point

It took 49 florets to go around the hem.

To make the fancy sleeves I cut a small sleeve cap and two rectangles. I bound the cap and the long edges of the rectangle. Then, when sewing it all into the sleeve hole I folded the rectangles around the cap and slightly gathered the short ends of the rectangle in the seam.  

I based my turban on this one from the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice series. 

I began by making the shape I wanted out of gardening wire and wrapping it in batting. I wound a long strip of my dress fabric over that, hand sewing to hold it in place. I left an edge hanging out to fray and decorated it with a string of silver bauble wound around at intervals. I secure the turban to my head by running bobby pins through the string of beads. 

I also made a matching reticule.