1920s Beaded Dress

At the end of March I had just sold my house and moved back in with my parents (temporarily while we find a new house). I received an invitation to go to the Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governer's Island in New York in June. I booked a flight, bought my ticket, and started looking at what I could conceivably make in the next two and half months with zero sewing supplies as they were all packed away in storage. I was perusing Pinterest looking at 1920s dresses when I stumbled across this gorgeous turquoise color beaded dress.

Those who know me best know I'm a sucker for anything teal, aqua, turquoise or variations thereof. The pin was a broken link so I reverse image searched it on Google and found the original Etsy listing for the dress. Sadly, it was a very old listing and had sold in August of 2013, but I needed it. I was trying to think of ways I could make something like it, but I decided that something like it wouldn't suffice, it had to be that dress.

A fellow costumer I follow on Instagram, Caroline (dressed_in_time, Dressed In Time (blog) ), had been posting about a dress and a few other items she was tambour beading, and it looked like what I needed to accomplish the beading on this dress. I had no experience with tambour beading but sent a few messages to Caroline with my beginner questions and she was super helpful. I took some tips from her posts about the beading process and purchased Delica seed beads from Fire Mountain Beads and Shipwreck Beads, as well as silk Guterman thread from Joann's. Around the same time I sourced my fabric.

I was nervous about trying tambour beading for the first time and was fully prepared for it to be a hot mess and go very badly. For this reason I was nervous about buying a nice fabric like silk, even though the original dress was silk crepe. I ended up finding a sale poly double georgette that looked to be the perfect teal color, so I bought a couple yards and waited anxiously. My fabric was delivered about a week later and I came home from work to rip open the package and nearly cried. It was not even close to teal. The color I received was a neon/electric blue monstrosity. This just would not do. I consulted a friend who has a bit of experience dyeing fabric and decided to overdye the fabric in yellow. I cut several swatches, and followed the directions on the label. The directions and web research indicated poly fabrics took longer to take dye so I needed to dye them for longer, but my swatch batches told me differently. I got a perfect teal color with about 5 minutes in the dye bath. I put in my full length, and held my breath. It came out beautifully! With fabric of the right color, and beads at hand I was ready to frame my fabric and get to work.

Full length dyed fabric, with strip swatch of original color.

My dad helped me build my tambour frame. He used some scrap 1x whitewood pieces he had lying around. I needed to frame the entire length of the dress, and to keep the frame a manageable size decided to bead each half of the dress separately. The frame ended up being approximately 60" x 35". We stapled twill tape to the length of each board, and bought 4 c-clamps to hold the corners. I followed framing instructions from Robert Haven's videos on YouTube, and voila!

While I had been waiting for all my supplies to arrive, I was carefully drafting my beading pattern. I was copying an original dress and the only thing I had available were the listing photos. Thankfully, the listing included garment measurements so I knew the original dress was 46" long. I found a scaling website that allowed me to upload a photo of the original dress, drag and drop a line the length of the dress and enter in the known measurement. From there I was able to drag and drop anywhere else on the photo and it would give me approximate measurements based on the scale of the photo. I drew out a rough sketch of the design and copied down all of the measurements. Then I used another website to print grid/graph paper with 1/8" lines and taped them all together. Then I started drawing. I worked with landmark measurements first like length and width, then moved inward to the smaller designs. It took a few days, a good eraser, and a lot of patience but by the end I had a workable pattern. Once I framed up my fabric I transferred my pattern. I wanted my markings to be something that would last but be easily removed in the end. I ended up using wet chalk. I just used regular chalk pieces and dipped them in water as I went. When they dried the markings stayed a little better than using plain chalk. Then I got to beading.

Beading pattern drawn on graph paper

Chalk pattern on wrong side of fabric

Paper pattern pinned to tambour framed fabric.

I learned a lot about the tambour beading process during the course of this project. I wouldn't say it was easy, but it took some finessing and getting use to before I was really proficient at it. In the end I probably could have gone with silk fabric and did just fine, but hindsight is 20/20. Robert Haven's videos were very helpful as well as a couple of others on YouTube. Just search for tambour beading, or tambour embroidery, or luneville embroidery. Some videos were just about embroidery and not beading, but I found those videos on direction and how to hold the needle, and starting/stopping to be very helpful in the overall practice. Some fellow costumers have been lucky enough to go to Robert Haven's workshop on tambour beading, but I didn't have the time or luxury for that so I ended up teaching myself and feel like I did pretty well. But, take that statement with a grain of salt. I've always been pretty good at picking things up on my own with very little instruction or no direct instruction. If that's not how you learn then it would probably benefit you to take a hands on course.

Beading is done from the wrong side of the fabric, beads are strung on a length of thread on the underside (right side) of the frame, needle is poked through wrong side, beads put into position and the thread wrapped around the hooked needle and pulled back through. Tails are woven in and tied off later.

Finished beading still on the frame.