1829 Blue Taffeta Dress

This dress is a transition between the style above and the style below! The skirt is fuller than the 1820’s ballgown and pleated the entire way around, and the sleeve is getting wider as it moves toward the extreme gigot sleeve of the 1830’s Hand sewn Dress. This one also has a nickname – Frankendress. Everyone who sews understands that every once in a while there is project where everything seems to go wrong. I did not have a pattern for this transitional period and was making one up as I went along. I kept changing my mind about whether to have it open in the front or the back, and each time I changed I had to undo the basted pleats in the skirt. Frustrated, I stopped picking them out with a seam ripper and began to just pull them out. The last time – the fabric ripped! I sewed the tear closed and hid it inside a pleat. As it was getting to be a monster of a dress and had a “stitches” where they didn’t belong, I started calling it Frankendress!