The Making of 18th Century Peasants

I used a combination of American Duchess Simplicity patterns, her first book, and JP Ryan Robe á L'Anglaise pattern to make them all. So this was my project for almost a year.  The girls dresses actually came together extremely quickly, but making three sets of stays for all of us, not so quickly.  And panniers for Elena and me, and bumpads for Isabel and me.  We luckily just used our Victorian petticoats--which made the pockets I made totally useless.  Oops.  And the shoes.  And hat and cap and all the details.  And then my dress kept giving me fits because I couldn't get one section of the back to lay smooth, I even recut it and replaced it. And then I lost a lot of weight so the dress doesn't fit as smoothly anyway.  So it ended up being a LONG project.  But I LOVE them. So worth it!

Who knew that so many tools were needed for sewing?

The pink dress was Isabel's inspiration gown and she insisted on a belt like above.  Technically an Italian Gown.



And these dresses were the inspiration for Elena's robe a la francaise.



And this is what Efraim did right when it was at the point above.  I about died, but it mended well.

Elena wore it to her middle school with a nice red slash across her neck and won first prize for her Marie Antoinette costume.  Sweet!

My kids dressed up my dress form and so I posted this on one of my Facebook historical costume groups and had the most comments I've ever got on any post. Good times.



I tried so many ways to try to make the trim on my dress work.  I tried dying it.  I tried making my own trim with bobbin work. (All the square trim is bobbin work).  I ended up spending so much time and money and then I just left it off.  Uggh.  I needed the same type of fabric or however they did it with the Marie Antoinette dress above with red belt.  What did they use??? Errrr....... If only I had the budget of movie.

We even practiced doing our hair.  Well we were supposed to go to a historical costuming group get together and I didn't finish my dress on time, and it just wasn't worth staying up till 5 AM to finish it.  But I like our hair better in the practice run sadly.  But I had just watched a ton of youtube how-to videos that I didn't rewatch when we went to take pictures.