Sunday 14 January 2018

Purple baroque dress

Found nice fabric, needed a gown for my third baroque character, a huguenot noblewoman - perfect coincidence. The fabric is a medium light cotton weave, warp in black, weft in purple, which makes a nice but not too bright colour, perfect for a young huguenot woman who might dare to risk a bit more colour but not stray too far from the usual dark colours.

The skirt has a circumfence of four metres, and as the fabric was just half width I had to add a good measure at the bottom. The decoration of three rows of velvet ribbon makes this hardly noticable.

The bodice is based on a crossover between an original 1630s pattern from "The cut of women's clothes" by Norah Waugh and the early baroque pattern from Holkeboer's "Patterns for theatrical costumes": instead of the tedious but authentic method of inserting darts along the hip section to gain width, I used the Holkeboer version of curved lines instead of straight, but without the stomacher, closing like the original with a high neckline. Also decorated with velvet ribbon and closing with matching bows. In this version I went for very full sleeves. And the tedious gores avoided, this can indeed become the staple two-hours-and-done-bodice.

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