Even before applying for the grant for this project, ideas were swirling in my head about what dress to do and how to do it. There were several images that I had come across in the collections at the Saratoga Springs Public Library that I thought could work, and a couple of them stood out in my mind, but once I was actually awarded the grant I went back to the collections to get a better idea of all of the options.
My focus was on the Robert Joki Stereoview Collection at the library because the library owns approximately 1,400 of them. There are a lot of options. And while the individual images on the cards are a bit small, when scanned at high resolution they scale up really well. The library had a local organization scan all 1,400(ish) of their stereoviews a few years ago, so it was just a matter of looking through and saving the ones I was considering (the images were all taken and published for sale pre-1890, so their copyrights have expired and they are now in the public domain. This eliminates the need for getting permission to publish, alter, and use them for advertising and other projects, short of crediting the library for providing me with the scans).
The more I looked at the images, the more intriguing dresses I found, and what I had thought were my top two choices were quickly crowded out by an abundance of other options.
The Victorian Archivist 