For the upcoming 1850s “Crinoline day” I decided i needed a new dress (even though I teqnicly have two perfectly functional ones already – Green 1840s and Brown 1850s Paisley)

This time I wanted to focus on the light summer dresses I’ve seen so many examples of lately.

So I picked one of my favourites as my main inspiration and started looking for fabric.Main inspiration

And to my surprise I found the perfect one straight away, and it was on sale. Yay! It’s a sheer cotton with the light feel of voile, and a pretty, light plaid pattern with lots of white to make the dress fit for summer.

At the moment I was rushing to finish my “Downton Mary dress“, so I couldn’t comit to the new project straight away, so to get tings moving I decided to start working on the skirt.

I almost used the same simple tequnices as in my sisters 1860s skirt (which I made a month later) – Cuting three skirt lenght of whole fabric widhts, matching the pattern and stitching them togeter to a huge circle.

Then I stsitched two rows of gthering stistches at the top and pulled to get the right waist measurment. I purpusly used one fabic widht for the front and two for the back, to disturbute the poufiness to the back.

Then I stitched a cotton tape to the gathered waist and turn it under by hand to get a small but sturdy waistband.

I used my dressform to measure and pin the skirt lenght Trying it out on my dressform

and make sure the back clouser looked good. 

Then I folded, pinned and hemmed the skirt, using 1 cm long heming stitches.

All and all it took about 4 hours and was an evenings welcome break from “Lady Mary”

The finished skirt:

A couple of photos with the skirt, (not) Gabardi blouse and green bonnet:

As you can see I also discovered I needed to shorten the skirt about 5-10 cm – great!
Back to the ironing table…

Nexts up: Construction for the dress bodice…