Well the cat is out of the bag so to speak so I’m allowed to reveal my part in our dress in a day project. Amanda posted on her LJ about the video from Colonial Williamsburg and we may or may not have taken it as a challenge. What can I say we’re ambitious.
Amanda has posted all the lovely finished pictures so I’ll just post the one I stole from her…
Amanda in the finished dress.
A few words about the techniques we used. We followed the construction techniques of the lavender dress in Costume Close-up. The original parameters were 1. Solid color, 2. Closed front NO matching petticoat and 3. Only very simple pinked trim…don’t let Amanda design gowns for one day projects.
So why did we make the dress for Amanda and not Alice or I? We tossed it around a lot and Amanda really did try to convince us to make one for either of us. but she has two things I don’t: 1. a really solid body block to base it off of and 2. She’s TINY so her seams are half the size of mine. Don’t underestimate short seams when sewing by hand in a day.
We started with it all cut out sans sleeves around 10am. Lunchtime saw the first fitting done and all of the bodice constructed sans sleeves. By dinner time we had the functional part of the dress finished. And I have full faith that with different trim we’d easily have finished the whole thing.
And I shall leave you with a few in-progress shots.
First Fitting
Second Fitting
Second fitting
we went through Four pots of Sticky Toffee Pudding tea
