My baroque character's name is Marguerite. And the motto of the upcoming ball is spring. So what else is there to do than plan a dress decorated with marguerites! Lots of them! From small to big, strewn all over the dress like a shower of spring-blossoms. It definitely helped that my preferred fabric store suddenly had plenty of lace-marguerites on sale. Finding the right fabric was a more difficult story and involved driving an hour to another fabric store. Well, things you do for your art when you can't spent fortunes on the silk you'd like to buy...
The pattern is, once again, the 1660s-gown from Janet Arnold. No train this time, I don't want to drag the white flowers through the dust. Cleaning the hem will be tedious enough. Funnily the design looked better in my mind than it did once I laid out the flower design on the hemmed skirt. I already feared I'd have to ditch the whole idea. But as it's meant to be more of a show-off costume, I decided I can just as well go a little over the top. Mixing the big flowers with smaller ones also helped greatly to improve the overall impression. Btw the grey satin behind the green taffetta is the grey 1630s in the making. I worked on two dresses simultaneously.
The resulting 117 big and about thrice as many small flowers were carefully pinned to the fabric in a regular pattern, dense at the bottom and lighter the higher up it gets, to create the impression of a shower of blossoms over the whole skirt. They were sewn on during my bus journey to my favourite flea market, but the nice useless things I bought there are a different story. Let me just mention that I ended up carrying home two antique chairs. Among other things. By bus. After having carried them through the city doing more shopping. Fabric shopping...
As always with my costumes there was a not-completely-finished-yet beta-version that I rushed through the machine until five minutes before dashing off for the ball, unkempt, swearing, and with luggage for three. The flowers on the bodice are still missing, as are the ones along the edges of the sleeves, and though after three dresses I've finally figured out the best way of sewing on the hook and eye bands the cover fabric still has to be attached to the front closing by hand. And I ditched the idea of a new chemise completely. Marguerite lace next time... But the overall outcome was good enough so far, and nothing to be ashamed of ;)
The bodice is now decorated with small flowers along all the edges, plus little bouquets of bigger marguerites at the waist. Given the hoopskirt and the petticoat, gaining a little circumfence still won't harm the silhouette.
The chemise is the same pattern as all that go with my 1660s, the lace now taking up the flower motif of the skirt.
I even made a petticoat. Having this very fancy, almost stage-like dress I felt a light-green petticoat would round the whole thing off. Decorated with the remainders of the marguerites, as I bought too many of them, as always ;) The overskirt can now be taken up to reveal a bit of the light green petticoat that mirrors the sleeve lining. I'll have to re-use the colour combination for a victorian dress, with more of the light green, it's really nice but sadly doesn't fit me at all if worn on its own.
And the decorations... Of course there's plenty of artificial marguerites to put into my hairdo, I even found metal ones to adorn the hairpins with. And I remembered I had some bits of lace from my earlier sewing days, and the piece in the shape of a chain of little flowers fittet around my neck perfectly as a choker. Together with plenty of other jewelry for baroque opulence, of course, like the marguerite ring I bought in Paris (in these modern days a girl has to treat herself to some jewelry...) for, umm, well, not solely for this outfit but to a great degree. I fear now I've finally reached the point where I buy not only everything with a fleur-de-lys on it but also all things with marguerites! :D
