 My desire to make an 18th century wrapping gown was sparked by a visit to the Netherlands in 2019, when my husband and I visited both the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Fries Museum in Lewarden. Both museums have fine collections of chints garments, including men's wrapping gowns in the Japans rock style, which the Dutch adopted as a result of their country's trade relations with Japan in the 17th century. The Fries Museum staged a significant chints exhibition a few years ago, including one spectacular wrapping gown in a glass case that lets you walk around it and get a really good close-up look at the front, back and sides. When I got home, I had a little dig-arounded museum collections online and spotted this example in the V&A, and I completely fell in love and moved this project straight up to the top of my list. Fueling the inspiration was the very handy fact that I had a gorgeous red-ground chints already in my stash. Lack of a pattern wasn't going to hold me back from just diving right in, but it's always good to check what's out there, right? I found this cutting diagram on Pinterest with no attribution or source citation. It seemed to conform in broad terms to the general cut of the wrapping gowns that I had seen in the Netherlands. However, there were a few key differences, in particular the cut of the neckline and the addition of a shaped facing that I didn't see in the Dutch examples or on the one in the V&A. I felt it was useful to look at the general layout of the body and note its similarities with the range of other garments that were being worn in the 18th century. Examining my fabric, I realized I would be able to use the full salvage of both my chints and my silk lining fabric, which would mean I did not need to cut separate sleeve extensions. This saved a bit of time and effort, and as it happened, my silk lining fabric was a bit wider than the chints. My first thought was how simple it would be to turn the lining up to the outside of the sleeve and simply fell it down to create a contrast turn-up cuff of sorts. However, in the back of my mind lurked a slightly more ambitious idea. The woman's wrapping gown in patterns of fashion 5 had been on my mind for a little while, and it hasn't actually left yet, but that's another story. Could I devise a style of cuff on the sleeves of my tunic style wrapping gown that might give the illusion of the pleated cuffs on the gown in patterns of fashion? It was worth a try. The first step in making this gown was to cut the main body, all in one, in both the fashion fabric and the lining fabric, exactly the same. I then nested the chints inside the lining, right sides together, and got both layers all nicely aligned, ready to join together up the main side seams and along the underside of each sleeve. To do this, I used the seeming stitch that did not have a name in the 18th century, sometimes today called the English stitch. This is a super slick technique to lay in a lining and enclose all the raw edges in just one process. From the outside, it looks like a completely normal seam. On the inside, it looks like the lining has been whipped in, laying not quite up to the same edge as the fashion fabric, which does show through just a bit. I love the even row of tiny little puggers you get in silk taffeta with this stitch. Having seamed up the front and back body pieces from hem at the bottom, right up through the curve of the underarm and down the sleeves, the next step was to hem the bottom. I deliberately cut the taffeta lining long enough to turn it up over the edge of the chints to create the appearance of a facing and up the center fronts and around the neck. And then simply turn under the edge of the silk and fell it down on top of the chints with teeny tiny stitches in red silk. As to thread color, yes the red does show against the taffeta, but it's a changeable silk, so trying to color match it would have been really tricky anyway. In any case, red silk thread was commonly used on a wide range of garments in the 18th century, even on garments that weren't red, so it seemed a reasonable period choice. You may also notice that I did not level off the hem at the corner where the skirt gores meet on the sides. It appears from digital collections that the body pieces were left level in the front and in the back, which resulted in corners like this when viewed from the side. I'll see what I think once I'm wearing the gown, if it bothers me I may go back and round off those corners. Here's how my attempt at creating the pleated cuffs came out. And now the gown's finished. This was a really simple, fun project. The real win for me is having something unstructured and comfortable to wear that ticks all the boxes for a fashionable look in the period made in the sumptuous fabrics that I love.