Old Sturbridge Village Museum has been generous in making images from their clothing collections available online. Several years ago I 'harvested' an image of what appeared to be a pink silk gown. Based on the length of the bodice, the width and cut of the skirt, as well as the layout of the decorative shell or petal element (laid out as lines radiating out from the waist towards the shoulders) their date of 1820 concurred with similar gowns depicted in Ackermann's Repository of Arts from the early 1820s.
The gown is a fairly simple design with no embroidery or excessive decoration, so I put it on my list of "things to consider making someday." The problem was that there was that I had only one image, a full-length front view. When Sturbridge posted additional detail pictures recently I knew it was time to give a try. Surprisingly, the gown was not pink, but rather a brown and white narrow striped silk.
I wasn't quite sure that I wanted a brown striped gown. That's when I remembered a piece of silk tissue taffeta I had gotten at Delectable Mountain Cloth in Brattleboro, VT. It was a deep blue shot silk that was the same weight and hand as a coppery brown piece I had used some years earlier to make a pelisse gown. An absolute joy to work with--like sewing air but never slithering off the sewing machine.
But did I have enough? It was 44" wide and I had 5.5 yards. I wanted to make the 5-piece skirt (one front panel, one back panel, two trapezoids on either side) of the 1820s instead of the 4-piece version so common in the 18-teens.
Then there were all those petals. First I needed to figure out their shape and size, then determine how many would be needed. The