I have awesome friends

The Dreamstress, in particular, is an enabler.  She keeps showing me pictures of things and encouraging me to make them.  Her latest suggestion is a necklace shaped like ouroboros, as seen in a 1801 fashion plate from Costume Parisien.

Close up of the snake's head.  This is made from nine or ten separate flat planes sewn together to make the head shape.

Here's the fashion plate in question.  Although the necklace is the focal point, the picture is small and not very detailed.  Even if you zoom in, all you can see is that the snake:

• Is green
• Appears to have a striped or spiral pattern on its body
• Has a detailed head with facial features sculpted in three dimensions

I've had to make my best guess at how the necklace might have been constructed and go from there.

The Rijksmuseum describes this as a gold necklace, but it's coloured green in the picture.  Perhaps it's supposed to be gold and emeralds, but it looks more like a beaded rope to me.  

I suspect what we see in the fashion plate is likely to be one of these:

Beaded snake made by an Ottoman prisoner of war during WWI.  It's made using a beaded crochet technique.

The snake is a good luck symbol in Turkey and some other Near Eastern countries, where beaded snakes seem to have been a traditional craft item.  During WWI, some POWs from the Ottoman Empire made beadwork items, including snakes like this one, to earn money.

In the early 19th century there was a lot of interest in Oriental art, which was novel and exotic to Western Europeans, and it wouldn’t be surprising for a fashionable Parisian lady to have a necklace made in the Ottoman Empire.  But this is just a hypothesis.  There are many ways to make a beaded snake, and the Costume Parisien illustration predates the WWI snake by over a hundred years.  In any case, I didn’t especially want to learn bead crochet.  I wanted something relaxing to do while binge watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race.  Thus, my necklace is a tubular net made with silk thread and there's no crochet involved at all.


HSM details

The challenge: Above the Belt.

Material: Tubular net made using glass seed beads.

Pattern:  N/A; I made it up as I went along.

Year:  1801.

Notions:  Silk thread, glass beads in sizes 12/0 and 6/0.

How historically accurate is it?  I believe the original necklace was probably made using different techniques.  My version resembles the necklace in the fashion plate, but it's not a replica of any specific object and it's not made using historical methods.

Hours to complete:  15 or so.

First worn: Not yet, but I plan to wear it out on the town!  This necklace is a great statement piece for 21st century wear.

Total cost: $47.50.  

Regency exoticism: millinery edition

Having made a Regency-era net dress, and having a small amount of silk left over, it seemed like a good idea to complete the outfit by making a turban with ostrich feathers.

It consists of a cap made from a circle of fabric gathered onto a band, with a strip of fabric wound around it and tacked in place to make it resemble a turban.  And ostrich feathers.  I found the optimal number of ostrich feathers was two.  One wasn't quite enough, and three looked more showgirl than Regency.

Here's a full length shot with the rest of the outfit.

Technically this is an imitation turban, not a real one, because it's actually made by draping a rectangular silk panel around a cap.  Some Regency-era turbans were made by winding a long piece of fabric around the head, more like a real turban, but there were also hats that imitated turbans and this project represents my best guess as to how such faux-turbans were constructed.  It's not the most educated guess I've ever made, because sometimes you just want a hat, not a trip down the research rabbit hole, but it replicates the look of Regency turbans as seen in paintings and fashion illustrations.

Here, for example, is a turban hat from around the end of the 1790s.

And here is a portrait of Countess Franziska von Weissenwolff, also from around 1800.

HSM details

The challenge:  Fabric manipulation.  This is a Regency-era turban hat made by draping and pleating a long strip of cloth around a fabric cap.

Material: Around .4 of a meter of silk.

Pattern: N/A

Year:  Late 1790s to early 1800s.

Notions:  Two ostrich feathers.

How historically accurate is it?  Probably no more than 50-60%.  Turban hats like this did exist, but really I just made it up as I went along.

Hours to complete:  4-ish.

First worn: Last weekend.

Total cost: $28. 

Opus reticulum

Today I'm taking a short break from my usual focus on the ancient world, to present a Regency era dress inspired by the ancient world.

This dress consists of cotton net, which I made using the same technique as fishing net, over a foundation of cotton voile, trimmed with blue silk.  It needs a petticoat underneath, but I haven't made one yet so for now you will have to use your imagination.  When the petticoat is finished I'll take some more photos.  

This is the first time I've done Regency.  It's not a period I typically pay much attention to, but I am a sucker for classicism.  Enter the Dreamstress with her copy of An Agreeable Tyrant, in which we find this fascinating Regency homage to ancient Egypt:

Image from the DAR museum.

My version isn't an exact copy of the DAR original for reasons I'll talk about later on in this post.

Back view showing how the net skirt is gathered onto the edge of the bodice.
This is not how it's done on the DAR dress, but there is at least one extant net
dress that does have its skirt attached this way.

Like the original, mine is a standard Regency round gown, with a lining that closes separately from the outer fabric.  It closes with pins, which is an appropriate period way to fasten a round gown and totally not something I did because I'm lazy.

Fishnet overdresses were a fad between about 1798 and 1802, and were presumably inspired by the western world's discovery of Egyptology at this time, thanks to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.  Note that although the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, the Westcar Papyrus wouldn't be translated until 1890, so Regency fashion designers had not actually read the Story of the Green Jewel.  Nor, of course, did they know about the tunic covered with beaded net found in Tutankhamun's tomb.  But Egyptian art sometimes shows net dresses, so people knew about the concept.

Fashion plates of the time show these Egyptian-inspired dresses could be made with or without a train, and with white or coloured net.  I like blue, and blue is very Egyptian, so mine is indigo blue over white cotton lined in white linen.  Making a trained version was just not feasible due to the amount of time it would take to make the net, which meant I had to alter the sleeves as well.  This is because the absence of a train is unusual for the 1790s and suggests my dress should be dated slightly later than the DAR original, so I've made the sleeves in a style which works for that slightly later date.  I've therefore copied the net detailing from the DAR dress's sleeves, but attached it to the short, straight sleeve shape typical of the very early 1800s.

It seems likely that these dresses were usually finished with ribbon, but I used strips of silk due to the difficulty and cost of acquiring appropriate silk ribbon.  I stand by that choice on the basis that it's historically plausible, and I would not have been happy to use polyester ribbon.  Even good quality poly ribbon still looks like poly ribbon, and it doesn't behave the same way as silk.

The pattern I used is a late 1790s overdress from Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion.  I adapted it a little bit to better resemble the dress in An Agreeable Tyrant, and to size it up a couple of inches, but overall I found the pattern worked pretty well as-is.  It's easy to work with and I highly recommend it.  However, I did have trouble with the sleeves.  This is to be expected.  Due to better childhood nutrition people today have more muscle mass in our arms and shoulders than our ancestors did, so original patterns will often need sleeve alterations (thanks to the Dreamstress for that information).

If you're fitting a Regency dress and, like me, don't know what you're doing, here's a link I found very helpful: Diary of a Mantua Maker's guide to fitting Regency gowns.



HSM details

The Challenge:  Sleeves.  The net overlay on these sleeves shows an interesting mix of Egyptian and Greek influence, and their construction is characteristic of early 1800s sleeves.  The pattern itself is as simple as a sleeve can be, but the overall effect is highly decorative thanks to the use of classically-inspired drapery.

Material: Half a meter of cotton voile, plus about one and a half square meters of cotton net and half a meter of blue silk for trimming.

Pattern: Late 1790s half robe shown on page 45 of Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion.

Year:  1800.

Notions:  Around 540 meters of cotton yarn to make the net.

How historically accurate is it?  Perhaps 60-70%.  I made an effort to research appropriate construction methods and fabrics, but this is my first Regency project and there are undoubtedly lots of things I don't know and could have done better.

Hours to complete:  No idea, and frankly I don't want to know.  Suffice it to say I've been working on this thing off and on since Christmas.

First worn: For fitting purposes.

Total cost: $40.