The Sewing Goatherd: All the Regency Dresses in One Weekend

My sister hatched a plan for her birthday party - a regency themed dinner party with the family, extended family, and some friends. Ohhh yes! I was all for this idea!

After hatching the plan, it was scheduled - for a weekend I already had a regency event scheduled for. Thus, I would take part in a Regency Fashion Show on Saturday and a Regency Dinner Party on Sunday. It was time for my early 19th century wardrobe to get some use!!

The Regency Fashion Show was scheduled for Saturday morning at a local historical site. The site portrays life from about 1799-1820, and several of us from the Saint Louis Historical Sewing Society took part in the fashion show.

We had a pretty good showing of styles from throughout the era, but you'll just have to take my word for it because I failed to take any pictures. Sorry!

I used the fashion show as an excuse to make the 1810's dress I've been planning and hoarding fabric for for the past 6-8 years. I finished my dress and bonnet around 1am Friday night.

That was about 10 hours before the fashion show started and 8 hours before I needed to leave home. So I really wasn't under *too* much of a time crunch.

My mom and sister came to see the fashion show and then the three of us spent an enjoyable afternoon wandering around the site, visiting the bakery and the tavern, talking to the interpreters, knitters, rope makers, rug makers, dyers, and such. It was a fiber arts show case weekend, which was, of course, of immense interest to my sister and I. She was able to learn a bit about the history of crochet - her current favorite craft.

Once we'd had our fill, we headed back to my parents' house to prepare the the Regency Dinner Party birthday gathering the next day.

Cooking, cleaning, and just a little bit of sewing.

Thanks to three different Pride and Prejudice plays over the past 7 or 8 years, my siblings and cousins had a pretty nice array of Regency costumes for the evening.

My mom wore her dress from my wedding and my aunt borrowed one of the costumes she'd made for my cousin.

Since she was the birthday girl, I did make my sister a new dress for the occasion. The other young ladies looked fantastic in their Pride and Prejudice dresses.

About half the guys dressed up to some extent. Our costume collections are a little short on things for the men.

My niece had a dress I made her last fall, which worked beautifully for the occasion. The only lady who didn't have a Regency-ish dress of some sort was my sister-in-law. So at about 9pm, the night before the party, my sister and I decided we'd better remedy that and set about making her a quick drawstring dress.