Since I was on a tight deadline when I made this dress, I didnt document much of the process. However, I can share a few pictures and notes on how I made it.
The jacket is made of a pink, red and white striped cotton lawn, lined in white cotton lawn. Silly me was going for cool with this outfit, so I took out as many layers as possible. The bulk of the dress was sewn on the machine with hand finishing as usual.
I started by fitting a new base 18th century pattern for the lining. Then I used the polonaise jacket from The Cut of Women's Clothes as a guide to patterning the polonaise-style overbodice. The jacket skirts are cut in once with the bodice as you can see from the picture below.
Once I had assembled the jacket, I wasn't pleased with the angle of the overbodice (despite many hours of patterning). It didn't cut away from the bodice enough for my taste, and seemed rather baggy. So I took a tuck under the arm to decrease the fullness. This changed the angle of the neckline quite drastically, so I had to become rather creative. I made a dart at the bust and then used trim to hide the gap between the two layers. When things like this happen, my motto is definitely "make it work" rather than start over.
The dress was then trimmed with ridiculous amounts of gathered cotton voile. Et voila! The finished dress:
Posted:
5/27/2012 3:09:10 PM by
Aubry | with
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