After some thought and discussion my younger daughter decided she wanted to enter the 'English Garden Created by Adult' category for the Dress a Sasha competition at the 2024 Sasha Doll Festival, in Milton Keynes. She wanted to feature her Sasha White Dress doll Laura, who has lovely long auburn hair. She looked at paintings and pictures online to find a pre-Raphaelite painting of a girl in a garden she could recreate, and came across the 1854 painting of Fair Rosamund by Arthur Hughes. The story being depicted has a dark twist to it and for a young woman who wears Goth and steampunk influenced outfits as leisure wear, the legend of Fair Rosamund in her hidden garden appealed a lot, as did the composition of the painting. Both of us could see lots of possibilities for how to achieve that scene, we bounced ideas (it was never a competition in our home, even though I was entering exactly the same category) and she decided to treat it as a creative project which she knew would take time and effort to complete.
The first challenge was deciding how to make the dress in the painting. We sorted through my fabric collection and found some possible candidates, but she was most concerned about how to make the bodice appear really close fitting to outline Rosamund's figure.
The bodice pattern for a Sasha dress I had made before wasn't quite fitted or long enough, so she redrew the pattern (first skill being developed) and made up the first draft using some spare old fabric from a skirt I had made years before. She wasn't satisfied with that version, so redrafted the pattern again and spent time carefully positioning and then stitching the darts using a sewing machine on both the lining (plain white fabric) and the main fabric before stitching the bodice together. She also drew the front bodice pattern for the gauze overlay fabric of the bodice, even though that part of the dress was the bit which was worrying her the most, as the fabric frays so easily.
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| L-R: pattern for gauze overlay front bodice, back bodice, front bodice pieces |
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| Laura models the second prototype of the bodice |
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| Close up of Laura modelling the second prototype of the bodice |
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| Back view of the second prototype, pinned in place |
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| Inside lining view of the second prototype of the bodice, showing the darts and seams |
Once she was happy with the second prototype bodice, she cut the bodice pieces in the main and lining fabrics chosen.
The question about how to do the front edges on the gauze overlay part of the bodice was answered for us by advice from our local sewing shop when one of the staff suggested using the rolled edge stitch on my overlocker machine! It worked, and my daughter was so relieved as she had been trying to roll and stitch the edge by hand with no success at all because it just frayed! Once the rolled overlocking had been done, it was tricky to position the overlay pieces when stitching the bodice together, as the overlay pieces had their seams captured with the other pieces (she did not want to stitch it as a separate bodice and this was exactly the right decision). So there was a lot of precision fitting and stitching, done carefully (she was far more painstaking and patient than I would have been). The overlay fabric does not have darts in it, so was a bit oversize above the waistline, but once the fabric was captured in the side seams, the excess was trimmed and it stretched gently over the darts in the bodice.
Once the bodice was assembled, she did a double gather of the skirt piece then drew up the gather, pinned it carefully to the bodice and then hand stitched the skirt to the bodice, doing a tiny stitch around each tiny gather! I was amazed at the tireless precision. Once she was satisfied that the skirt hung right on the bodice, she stitched the lining to the skirt with tiny neat stitches (not photographed).
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| Stitching the skirt to the bodice with tiny stitches around each gather |
Now the dress was assembled she hemmed the skirt by hand, catching the fabric on the inside by a thread each time so as to make the stitches almost invisible on the outside. Then came the creative bit she was looking forward to doing - the embroidered waistband. She put a 7mm wide dark green satin ribbon in a small embroidery hoop, selected a golden yellow coloured embroidery floss, drew out a scaled copy of the lettering from the painting of the waistband on some paper to get the size of the letters right and started embroidering the ribbon. She wasn't satisfied with anything less than perfect, unpicking stitches occasionally and showing me progress. |
| DollMum's daughter embroidering the waistband with Rosamund's name |
The back of the dress was fastened with snap fasteners (press studs) and the waistband was carefully stitched to the dress once most of them had been stitched on, then the final pair were stitched in line with the waistband. Due to the fullness of the skirt, she decided the back of the skirt did not need to be joined as it was hidden in the display (and she was running out of time), also the fabric edges didn't need hemming because she had cut the skirt from the full width of the fabric, to get a good gather. She put the dress on Laura, fastened it at the back then rejoiced, on the Thursday morning just before the festival, in doing the final detail she had been looking forward to doing all along - the fine lacing of the overlay gauze bodice, using a single thread of cotton to lace the two sides of the bodice together from the waist up in a criss-cross pattern, stitching it while the dress was on the doll, so the tension would be right.
In the meantime, the base and backdrop was being created. Plywood boards were cut to size by our local timber merchant and my husband made up some brass brackets which were used with round head brass screws to fit the boards together. My base and backdrop was made in the same way.
My daughter printed out an enlarged version of the painting to get it to the same scale as the doll, then glued a section of the background of the painting on thick card. However, it didn't cover the whole piece of card, so she used lots of paper leaf and flower sections from the painting in a collage effect to cover the remaining card (back and sides). This collage work took several hours to complete - once again she was meticulous in trying to get it as close to the painting image as she could so it would look natural. The glue stick ran out so she bought a cheap alternative then discovered how rubbish that was, so I got the proper stuff in a quick trip to a local shop.
She painted the base board thick card with acrylic paints, mixing the colours to get the mottled path right, and painted on some fallen leaves, also extending the shadows from the background section of the painting, she said it was good to do some artistic painting again, the last time she did was about 5 years ago for GCSE art.
The Dress a Sasha rules requested entrants use as much in the way of recycled materials as possible, however she purchased some strands of small scale imitation ivy and some plastic flowers from a local shop, as making these would not have been feasible in the time available. We found some blocks of green oasis left over from a craft workshop I had run 6 years ago and she cut out some of the foreground plants and flowers from the enlarged print of the painting, then cut around them to get the shapes right. These were pinned or pushed into the oasis blocks, then arranged on the base board to build up the foreground planting.
It seemed to make sense to display the description card with a picture of the painting on a miniature easel, as the original was a painting. The description card was glued onto a piece of thick card. The description says:
Fair Rosamund by Arthur Hughes (1854)
Legend tells how Rosamund Clifford was given a hidden garden beyond a maze at Woodstock Palace, Oxfordshire by King Henry II but his jealous wife Eleanor of Aquitaine discovered the entrance and poisoned Fair Rosamund. The iris and foxglove flowers in this painting of her garden predict her death by poison, with the Queen in the background. Historical accounts indicate that when her affair with the king ended, Rosamund went to Godstow Abbey and died there aged 40 in 1176, so was not poisoned by the Queen. This pre-Raphaelite painting is now in Australia: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/4069/
Towards the end of making her Dress a Sasha, my daughter said she would soon need another creative project to work on, as she had enjoyed this one so much.
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