Civil War era dress

 Most of this blog is about collecting Singer machines and accessories, but I actually use them, too!  I am not an accomplished seamstress, but such as it is here is my most recent project.

In order to do interpretations at local history venues, I made this "working" dress from the Civil War era.  I am kind of shooting blindly with this, because I don't have a direct source work with, but having found this silhouette to follow, I adapted a pattern to copy it pretty closely

I'll mention that my level of authenticity is probably about a 7/10.  I wanted the cut, style, fabric, and sewing techniques to be as close to the period as I could reasonably meet.  I intended it to be more of a reproduction garment than a costume - so no zippers, for example. (HERE is an example of a costume I was commissioned to make from their choice of pattern and fabric.)  At the same time,  it has to be feasible for me to produce this, so I'm going to take advantage of "shortcuts," with my handy Singer gadgets.

Here's one of them:  The ruffler on my 237 Fashion Mate which did a wonderful job of pleating the skirt.  In just a couple of minutes, nearly four yards of fabric were perfectly, and evenly pleated.

It was probably at least twenty years after the Civil War before anyone would have had a sewing machine at home (a treadle, of course) so this would have all been stitched by hand, including the buttonholes.  In Little Town on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder described how she made buttonholes by hand:  

It is not easy to space buttonholes exactly the same distance apart and it is very difficult to cut them precisely the right size...  When she had cut the buttonholes, Laura whipped the cut edges swiftly, and swiftly covered them with the small, knotted stitches, all precisely the same length and closely set together.  She so hated making buttonholes that she had learned to do them quickly and get it over with.  

When I considered making my buttonholes by hand - since the stitching would be visible on the garment - I remembered that passage, and I thought nah....  So my 237 cranked them out in a couple of minutes with the Singer Automatic Buttonholer:

And I did fabric covered buttons, which I think looked great with those machine-stitched buttonholes (still need to sew on two more.)

This dress was adapted from Butterick 5831, although I made lots of changes from a full-skirted evening dress in a sheer, drapey fabric to a more practical every day calico work dress with a more fitted bodice.

Don't know if this would pass muster with the most hard-core Civil War reenactors, but for my purposes it will do nicely.