Several years ago (possibly 2014) I took my first foray into historical costuming and made a vaguely Regency-era dress using a dark green cotton and Simplicity 4055 (which is evidently no longer in print). I was proud of how it turned out then, and frankly I'm still proud of it, considering my lack of sewing knowledge at the time. Since then I've done more research and learned more about sewing, so I decided to make some slight alterations to the dress.
Or it started as "slight" alterations - just making the sleeves shorter and letting out the hem. Then, much in the style of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," I decided that I wanted to re-set the sleeve completely, and fix the neck drawstring casing, and I should probably fix the waist drawstring too, and, well, I might as well just remove the bodice completely and re-pleat the skirt...
Yeah.
When I put on the dress to decide on alterations, I discovered that the gathering in the sleeves was more toward the front of the dress, which gave them an awkward look. So, I grabbed my seam ripper and removed the sleeves. After a quick iron, I re-set them by machine, keeping all the gathering in the upper back panel of the bodice (see the picture below). I tried it on again and discovered that re-setting the sleeves that way also fixed an issue I was having that limited my arm mobility!
The dress was originally long-sleeved, but they were a bit too short for my arms. I like the elbow-length sleeves seen in a lot of fashion plates from the era, so I cut off the bottom of the sleeve and hemmed the new sleeve by hand.
Seeing the nice hand stitching compared to my wonky, inexperienced machine stitching on the neckline drawstring casing convinced me to rip out that stitching and re-sew it by hand with a simple running stitch. I also decided to make the casing slightly narrower - somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2", instead of 3/4". This had the added benefit of making the gathered drawstring look neater.
And If I re-do the neckline casing, I had better make the waistline casing match, right? So I picked up my seam ripper once again.
Unfortunately, that gave me an up-close-and-personal look at where the bodice and skirt were attached. The inside bodice (it's two layers) had been topstitched to encase the raw edge of the skirt, but I hadn't turned under the raw edge of the inside bodice! So, of course, I had to re-do that, too. At some point I picked at the wrong line of stitching and...
Well, I didn't like the way the back of the skirt was gathered anyway.
So the skirt was removed, ironed, re-pleated, and reattached by machine. Then the lower edge of the inner bodice was turned under and stitched down by hand. A running stitch finished off the drawstring casing at the waist.
That just left the hem. Like the sleeves, it was a bit shorter than I liked (or perhaps I was shorter when I first made the dress). Luckily, it had a fairly deep hem - there were just over two inches of fabric available. So out came the seam ripper and the iron and the needle and thread, and I gave the skirt a narrow, hand-sewn hem. And, finally (FINALLY), I was done.
Ultimately, the dress doesn't look drastically different than it originally did (despite the fact that I completely removed the bodice and sleeves), but I'm still much happier with how it looks! It was kind of fun to look back at something I sewed so long ago and see how far my skills have come, too.
I might like to re-do the sleeves again in the future. They are very loose around the arm, which I don't think is very flattering, and most fashion plates and paintings from the era show more snug sleeves. I might also remove the machine top-stitching around the back closure. We'll see.
Stay warm. Stay safe. Stay healthy.
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