Yellow renaissance dress

A.k.a. "picknick dress", as I think the colour fits green meadows and joyful picknicking. Years ago I made a landsknecht-outfit for my former boyfriend and, as always, bought more fabric than I needed. Even made a tablecloth from the yellow jacquard. Still enough left for a dress. The fabric has a woven pattern of - guess what! - marguerites that I followed with the embroidery. I set out with eight colours and two shades of green in my mind, using up thread I had on stock and just buying the missing material. Six shops and two changes of colour ideas later I had finally made up my mind what to use. It's amazing how much the pink upset the colour palette before I exchanged it for a pale yellow!

The embroidering is perfect work for being on the train or bus, and luckily last summer took me here and there and back again often enough to finish a sleeve and a half. The rest was done watching "Penny Dreadful", figuring that the only dreadful thing in this series is the horrid wearout when it comes to hotties. All 27 episodes left me with an almost fully embroidered renaissance gown and the firm decision to copy umpteen nice dresses from Vanessa's and Angélique's wardrobe for my victorian collection. Needless to say that the picknick came with the dress being only embroidered but not sewn, so I fear I'll have to organise yet another baroque picknick. Preferably with a different picknick blanket that's not made from the same fabric as my dress...

The gown follows my usual bodice pattern, only this time with side seams to have the woven pattern follow the neckline so as to be able to embroider it. It's embroidered heavily at the front as well as along the neckline.

The sleeves are two-part each, joined with (hand-made) strings along the front and back of the arm, one embroidered top and one plain bottom part.

The skirt has a seam circumfence of close to five metres but only sports a couple of scattered marguerites and leaves. I'm not THAT mad, after all!