Some of the dresses in the boutique are not made from new fabric at all. They are made from antique christening gowns, cut down and given a second life at doll scale.
Why I collect them
I began buying antique gowns because I was intrigued by them - by the style of them, and by the way they were made. Rows of pintucks no wider than a thread. Lace worked into the hem rather than sewn on top. Seams finished by hand because there was no other way to finish them. I wanted to look at that work closely, and then I wanted to keep it.
Over time the buying became a collection, and now it is a large one.
How they are bought, and what usually arrives
A collection this size is not assembled one careful purchase at a time. Much of it comes from bundles - several gowns sold together as one lot - and bundles are where the trouble is.
Most of them are put up by resellers rather than by families, and a reseller knows exactly what they are doing. One good gown goes in the photographs. The rest of the lot is made up around it: pieces that are not worth cutting into a doll dress, and in some cases not sound enough even to line one. You are buying the photograph and taking the rest on trust.
There is no way to avoid it, only to expect it. I buy knowing that one gown out of a lot may be the only one worth having, and I price my bidding on that basis rather than on the picture. Anything better than that is a good day.
Not all of them are cut
This is worth saying plainly, because it decides everything else. Only some of the gowns are ever remade.
Some are never going to be. Several of the pristine ones - the exclusive pieces I paid top price for, whole and unmarked - have already been given to babies for their own christenings, worn again as they were meant to be. Others are put away for grandchildren I hope to have one day. And a few are so finely worked that they belong in a museum rather than in anybody's wardrobe; those are already promised as a future donation to a museum collection.
Everything else in the wardrobe can be used, and I want to be clear about what that means. I do not buy poor gowns. A gown with nothing left in it is of no interest to me - I would not give it house room, let alone a shelf. Every one I own was bought because the work in it was worth owning.
So what comes to the sewing table is not the leftovers. Sometimes it is one of the very best, and I cut it on purpose. A doll dress is looked at closely, in a way a gown folded away in a wardrobe is not. If the finest work I own is going to be seen by anyone, it has to come out of the wardrobe.
Cutting, and what is kept back
When a gown is going to be used, it gets cut. There is no way round it. What goes into the doll dress depends on how long that dress is meant to be. For a long dress - and with these gowns that is most of them - the full length of the original skirt is used, waist to hem, exactly as it was made. For a shorter dress only part of that length is needed, and the rest stays behind.
The seams are not unpicked - they are cut away. A seam is bulk, and bulk is the enemy of storing anything for years, so every one of them comes off and what I keep is clean flat pieces and nothing else.
Those pieces are wrapped up together, as one bundle belonging to that gown. It has to be together, because no two of these are the same fabric. If a piece is ever wanted again - a sleeve, a cuff, a bodice for a smaller doll - it has to be found next to its own kind, or it is no use.
Every gown goes into the freezer for twenty-four hours before it is allowed any further into the house. Nothing textile comes in without doing that. One infested parcel would be into a fabric stash built up over many years, and there would be no undoing it. After the freezer it is washed, folded, and put away in the wardrobe - so whatever is eventually made from it starts from clean cloth.
The gowns set aside for remaking are sorted before any of this begins: one group for the bigger dolls, one for the smaller. That decides what a gown can give, and it decides where the cut falls.
There is a rule before any of it, though. I will not cut into an antique to try out a design I have not already made. Anything new is worked out first in ordinary cotton bought by the metre, as many times as it takes, and only when I can sew it properly does it get near the wardrobe. A pattern can be printed again; a gown cannot.
Choosing which one is never quick. It is done at the wardrobe, one gown at a time: unfolded, looked at, held against the plan I have in mind and against the doll it is meant for. Does this one suit it? Is there another further down that would suit it better? Sometimes the answer is in the first ten. Sometimes I go all the way to the bottom.
Two hours can go by that way, and most of it is not deciding at all - it is looking. Turning a hem to the light to see how the tucks were spaced. Finding where somebody joined a length of lace and made the join disappear. I have looked at these dresses many times over and I still stop at them.
Because going through them takes so long, I do not carry down only one. As I work along the wardrobe I set aside a few that could do, and they all come to the sewing room together - so that when I sit down I have the choices in front of me and no reason to climb the stairs again.
Cutting also leaves plain fabric - lengths with no pintucking, no lace, nothing that could carry the detail on a dress. That is not waste either. It becomes what goes underneath: slips, underskirts, long pantaloons in the antique style, made from the same cloth as the dresses and finished the same way.
Then there are the gowns from those bundles that were never going to make a dress, and the ones that simply arrived worse than they were described. On those, the lace is often the one thing still worth having. It comes off unpicked by hand, a little at a time, and it is kept.
There is no sensible argument for doing this. Taking the lace off a gown can cost hours, and new lace can be bought in minutes for less than those hours are worth. I do it anyway. Somebody sat and sewed that lace on by hand, and a baby was dressed in it for a christening - a happy day for a family I will never know anything else about. Saving it is the only way left of honouring either of them.
The laces live in big glass vases in my sewing room. The vases came to me with flowers in them, given by people I care about, and they do two things at once now. They keep something precious where I can see it, and they keep the people who gave them beside me while I work.
What carries over, and what has to be made new
The skirt of a doll dress comes from the hem of the original gown. That is the part worth saving: the pintucking and the worked lace edge on the finished dress are the ones the gown was made with, in their original positions, at their original spacing. Nothing there is a reproduction.
It is rarely as simple as cutting a length and gathering it. On a gown the whole of the decoration can sit in the bottom eight inches - layer on layer of lace, and all of it already gathered once. Lace that has been gathered cannot be gathered again onto a doll's waist; it will not go, and forcing it would ruin what makes it worth using.
So the skirt gets rebuilt. Sometimes I take a narrow band from the very bottom - two inches, enough to keep the lace edge intact - and make up the rest of the depth with plain fabric taken from higher up the same skirt. Sometimes it takes two sections joined together, and then more fabric joined above that, before there is enough to gather at the waist. No two gowns present the same problem and no two are solved the same way.
Sometimes the sleeves carry over too. If the original sleeves have detailed lace work on them, they are worth keeping whole and using as sleeves - which is why a dress made this way is usually long sleeved, and usually for one of the bigger dolls. There has to be enough of a doll to carry them.
The bodice is a different matter. It is the most worked part of the gown - the lace and the closest of the pintucking are usually there - and now and again one is sound enough to be used as the bodice of the doll dress. That is the best outcome, and it is not the common one. On most gowns the bodice is exactly where the damage is, so the very part that carries the finest work is the part that cannot be saved.
When it cannot, the bodice is made new. The pintucks in it are worked to match the rows already running through the skirt, so that the new part and the old part read as one garment rather than two. Vintage lace is added where it belongs, chosen to sit with what is already there rather than to compete with it.
How they are finished
- A gathered skirt, cut very full, so the antique fabric hangs as it should
- Puffed sleeves with cuffs, scaled to the doll rather than shrunk from a child's pattern
- A lined bodice, with the lining finished by hand
- An opening all the way down the back, closing with snaps, so the dress goes on without forcing anything over the doll's head
Why I cannot work from your own gown
I am asked this, and the answer is no. It is worth explaining why, because it is not indifference.
Sewing is not surgery, but it does carry risk. Working from my own material I very rarely make a mistake - and yet on a commission I will make at least one, every time. Something about working to somebody else's requirement does it. With my own fabric that costs me a piece in the bin and an evening started again. With a gown that belonged to your family, there is no second piece and no starting again. I am not willing to be the person who ends it.
There is the practical side too. Everything textile that enters this house is frozen for a day before it goes anywhere near the sewing room, for the reason above, and a stash of this size is not something I will gamble on a parcel from an unknown house.
Why each one is a one-off
There is only as much of a gown as there is. When the hem has been used, that particular set of pintucks and that particular lace are gone. The next dress comes from a different gown and will not look the same, however similar the two might seem in a photograph. That is the nature of the work, and it is the reason none of these can be repeated to order.
There is something else in them as well, and I will say it plainly because I believe it. Every one of these gowns was made for a happy occasion, or worn at one. Somebody sewed it in anticipation of a good day, and a child was carried in it on that day, surrounded by people who were glad. That is a great deal of goodwill stitched into one small garment.
I think that stays in the cloth. It goes into the doll dress when the gown is remade, and it goes on into the house the dress is sent to. Whether you take that literally or not, it is why I work this way rather than reaching for a new length of fabric.
So if you are looking at one of these dresses in the boutique, this is what you are buying: a piece of somebody's hand sewing from a long time ago, kept where it could be kept, made wearable again at a size that fits the doll on your shelf - and the good day it was made for, carried forward.
These are made for the dolls I sew for: Sasha, Meadow, Little Darling, Pongratz and Connie Lowe.
See what is currently in the boutique
P.S. This was written in one go, straight out, with nothing planned in advance - so I have almost certainly left something out. I will add to it as things come back to me.
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