This 1762 portrait by Sir Nathanial Dance-Tolland is one of my favorite 18th Century fashion references. I love the puffy blue stomacher bows. I love the enormous pearls worn high on her neck. I love the pet squirrel. But most of all, I love the lace mantelet that she is wearing over the top of all of it! When I saw a certain piece of embroidered silk gauze on a fabric remnant website, I did a little happy dance. While less heavily textured than the fabric in the portrait, the embroidered silk gauze has such a similar scale and vibe that I reckoned it was MEANT – I could make the blonde silk gauze mantelet from the portrait!
Isn’t it just absolutely perfect?
I cut out all the pieces of the mantelet in anticipation of our relocation to North America. I wanted a few easily-portable hand-sewing projects to work on while we traveled and got ourselves established. For this project, I used the Burnley and Trowbridge Mantelet pattern. Construction was pretty simple. I hemmed the mantelet body and the hood, and then I hemmed several meters of trim.
Then I sewed up the back of the hood and cartridge pleated it.
I pleated the neck of the mantelet body. I stitched both body and hood to the neckband and whipped down the facing.
I played with the trim until I had a pleat arrangement I liked, and then i stitched it down.
Everything went smoothly until I got 9/10ths of of the way around applying the trim, and discovered that I hadn’t made enough of it. After using up all my trim, I still had 12 inches of mantlelet left bare. And my silk scraps were all in a shipping container somewhere on the Pacific between Chile and Canada!
That poor mantelet sat in my suitcase as a lonely UFO until we’d completed the move, found somewhere to live, unpacked all our boxes, set up our new home, and I – eventually – found the time to go through my fabric stash and find one specific little plastic baggie of very specific bits of silk.
And so – Last week I cut one last length of trim, hemmed it, stitched it onto the existing length, and finally covered up the poor bare patch.
It was a pretty good feeling to be done at last!
I stitched on a pair of pink silk ribbon ties, and there it was – my blonde silk gauze mantelet, ready for action.
(A side note – it won’t actually be worn with the midnight sultana. The sultana just happened to be sitting on the mannequin when i wanted a photograph…)
Bibbidy-bobbidy-BOO!
