My dress is basically the same pattern as the burgundy gown I made two years ago, only this time I worked with dupioni-silk. No point in investing hours of embroidering on artificial fabric. I'm working with cotton thread nonetheless, as this is going to be just some kind of test-version before I go completely nuts and start silk embroidery - the next dress is already in planning... The colour of the fabric is a beautiful, very dark blue in daylight, seeming almost black in artificial light.
The embroidery:
As the name of the character I'm playing is Marguerite, I decided to work a pattern of little flowers all over the bodice and sleeves, the edges decorated with a pattern similar to wooden trellis. I knew it would cost me hours, but thanks to Dr. Who and various other BBC productions that infiltrate your brain with valuable information on things you never knew were that interesting, quickly made good progress.
I started with working the trellis-pattern along all the future edges of the bodice and the sleeves in dense herringbone stitch and stem stitch as an outline. Marking the flowers was almost as much work as embroidering them. I fear I'm just too much of a perfectionist... The marking was done in white pencil, as it stays on longer than chalk but still rubs off after some time. The draft was done with five petals, in reality it turned out it looked half-hearted, so there we are with eight spokes on the little marked-out wheels that are to become the marguerites. Each flower is about 1.2 cm in diameter.
The next stage after the marguerites was the leaf border to connect them. I really came to hate those tiny, fiddly leaves that forgive not even the tiniest mistake. But after like a hundred leaves or so you get the knack. Only by then, you're almost through with them anyway! The stems are stem stitch, the leaves satin stitch, and the dots french knots added to create the arcade effect.
And then I could go really crazy and do the little bouquets... Here's a close-up of one, with a french knot in the centre and fly stitches as decoration. They only have six petals, otherwise you couldn't interlace them. And as the flowers were slightly larger than in the sketch, I worked only four of them instead of five and left the stems aside. That made for a literally more well-rounded picture.
With the edges of the bodice nicely framed, I was left with the design of the front, which should be a little more elaborate. I decided to but the bouquets on stems which give the stomacher a nice horizontal balance.
Still there was some space left in the top corners of the front closure. I toyed with some more flowers, but it looked plain. Too many flowers already. I needed something extravagant. And as the dress was designed as my character's engagement gown, I worked the initials of me and my fiancé into the corners. They look as if they had always belonged there right from the first sketch ;)
The sewing:
Basically this dress is the same pattern as my burgundy gown. Only as I did that one in great hurry back then and had no time or nerves for taking pictures, I will post some here.
The bodice consists of four layers: two between which the boning is sandwiched, one top layer (in this case, the embroidered silk), and one lining. All parts are thus cut out and put together so you end up with four bodice shapes, more or less identical in size. I always try to make the outer layers a tad bit larger (we're ralking here only of millimetres), but that's just my perfectionism. I used black cotton twill to carry the boning and light black cotton for the lining.
The inside of the bodice was exactly the same tedious kind of work as my burgundy gown a couple of years ago. You cut all parts twice from sturdy fabric that won't be seen in the final product but will carry all the boning. I used plastic boning that I zig-zagged right onto the fabric of one of the inside layers, this is covered by the second inside layers so no boning is seen anymore, and no plastic edges can dig into your hips. As this second layer will cover the boning completely, you don't have to worry about visible seams, only about the exact position of the boning. I took pictures of the outside and inside. As the boning I used comes by metre in a large roll, it's still bent. In this case, use it the way you will be squeezing it towards your body when the bodice is worn, so it will make a nice shape and gradually adjust to your shape.
The sleeves are cut out twice, once from silk and once from cotton for the lining, sewn together on their left sides right beside the embroidery, and turned over to form a neat edge that is now hand-pleated evenly and secured with invisible stitches.
You will want to sew on the hooks and eyes before the embroidered silk layer to avoid visible machine stitches at the front. And once the top fabric has then been hand-stitched onto the boned bodice, you have to maneuvre the whole, stiff thing through the machine again to attach the sleeves and the skirt. I swore. A lot. Because, of course, as always, time was already pressing, and the hours until the ball melted away, and still there was the packing and shopping to do... Which, in the end, thankfully was done for me this time, with the result that indeed we managed to get to the ball in time. What a new experience! :D
