When I purchased Felicity several years ago, she was wearing an antique dress and antique underthings. They’re a little bit fragile, so I’ll be packing them away for safekeeping in an archival box. But before I do, I wanted to share construction details (nobody ever seems to do this and to me, as a seamstress, it’s the most interesting part).
The drawers are cotton with cotton lace. The quality of the sewing isn’t tops. Where the tucks meet on each leg, they don’t match. The open crotch seam is finished, but the bottoms of each leg where the lace has been attached have raw edges.
The slip is beautifully made, with perfectly spaced tucks and overcast interior seams. But it doesn’t have any type of closure. It was pinned – yikes! – straight into Felicity’s body, right through her leather. Perhaps we now know why she’s such a pouter. The stitches look, to my untrained eye, like they were made by machine. There are 23-24 per inch (I needed magnifiers to count accurately).
Felicity’s dress is also expertly made. My favorite thing is the teeny weeny little hems on the collar and bottoms of the sleeves – no more than 1/16th of an inch. The center back seam is done in the French style and the armscye seams are hand overcast. As for the sleeves, they were shirred and tacked to interior linings (and hemmed) before being seamed.
Two things about the remaining construction surprised me. First, the waistband is lined with fabric that looks very much like the petticoat cotton (it has a slight sheen) but the interior edges of it are raw. Each long edge is folded to the inside, then the skirt is cartridge pleated to the bottom edge and the bodice gathered and overcast to the top edge. Neither the turned down skirt edge or the turned up lower bodice edge, is finished. The other surprise was the method for attaching the collar. It was sewn with the right side facing the inside of the dress, then flipped to the outside. The raw edges beneath are not finished. You see this method in patterns from the turn of the century, but I did not know this was done so early as I presume this dress to be. Note, also, the dogleg on the right side of the waist.
To follow along as Felicity’s wardrobe grows, click HERE.