Plaid Basque Ensemble, 1850s

Finally finished my red plaid wool 1850s dress. I wanted a basque bodice this time, both because they're a popular style that is not well-represented in my current 1850s wardrobe, and because they're a bit more versatile than a round dress (because contrasting bodice/skirt combinations are possible).

Probably should have pulled out the dress form for this.

The fabric is a tropical weight wool suiting that I got from Pendleton several years ago; it's lined with white cotton muslin; the skirt is faced with dark blue cotton (I think from an old sheet), and the basque with self-fabric; the hem tape is a a red wool twill tape from Burnley & Trowbridge and the skirt waistband is a white cotton grosgrain ribbon from my stash.

The skirt's just the usual rectangles, balanced at the top, while the basque bodice is draped-to-fit (shout-out to Kiki for fitting the darts and seams to me).  The sleeve's also draped-to-fit at the shoulder, but the rest of the shaping is modeled on a couple of late 1850s open (pagoda) sleeves in Patterns of Fashion I.

I like the fit of the dress, which is comfortable, particularly through the sleeves (where too-tight armcyes are a recurring problem for me). There's a slight excess of fabric at the top of each sleeve, which I might remove in future; it's not egregious, but I don't love it. On thing which did not turn out as intended is that I meant for this dress to have a shallow V-neckline, again to deal with a fitting problem area (no matter how many times I pin out the excess and swing the darts, I end up with extra fabric at the neck). Despite cutting it as a V-neck on the toiles, when I copied them to the actual fabric, it ended up looking more like normal jewel neckline. It's not gaping, so I can certainly live with it, but I'm going to need to revisit it to figure out how that managed to happen.