Regency Ball Gown Details

Finally got a few detail shots of my Regency gown.

The dress is silk satin with a silk net overlay. The neckline is inset with silk bias binding based on a period example, and the silk netting is caught up in 6 piped silk "fingers" to add more detail to the bodice. Hand embroidered spots with beading. The silk net was hands down the most expensive fabric I have ever worked with. I'd tried cotton Net, but it was thick, chunky and didn't hang right. Stretchy too. The silk has a beautiful hand and moves gracefully, and was near invisible.

I tried lots of embroidery methods on it, and had no luck until I came up with this design. The hexagon shape was tricky to work with, as I think much of the period net was tighter. Didn't have a huge amount of time either, so this was the design. Unfortunately the net would change shape after I'd take it out of the loop. It does not react like fabric with a warp and a weft and distorts in one or two of the 6 directions. So my perfectly circular spots became uncircular after being removed from the hoop.

The puffing on the skirt is gathered up by strips of gold bullion embroidery, purchased from a EBay seller from India. Wasn't crazy about the rhinestones but they proved too hard to replace.

Designing the puffing was a fun bit of mathy-math. I knew I wanted the embrodiery on a 60 degree angle and the length of the hem, and that a diagonal gather would pull in a vertical and horizontal direction. The embrodiry motif is only so long and is the hypotenuse, so I did trig to figure what the shrinkage was. It worked well.

I had wanted more poofiness around the bust and back, but the netting gathers up to nothing and loosens up at the same time. Hence the saggy look when I was going more for gathers. This is 3x gathering too, so not like I skimped. Back was 2.