Well I've got my fabric for the velvet overgown. I got eight yards of a very nice chocolate brown cotton velvet. I have been debating whether to dye it darker, it is a bit lighter than I had originally wanted, but now I've decided to just leave it alone. I also have the silk for the undersleeves. Its an orangy-gold doupioni. It doesn't have nearly as many slubs as most doupioni though, so it should be alright. I'm going to pleat the sleeves the way they are seen in some portraits.
I also just ordered Janet Arnolds's Patterns of Fashion, so that should be arriving sometime in the next week! I want to wait until I have it before I cut into my velvet, I have a sneeking suspicion that the skirts in those days were not as full as I've been thinking.
About a week ago I picked up some jewels for my kirtle at Michaels. They are those Swarovski crystal things used for bracelets and watch bands and stuff. Only problem is that they're silver, so I'm painting them gold. The jewels will go where the shells are in the original portrait-around the neckline of the kirtle. That will definately make the kirtle upper class, as no middle or lower class woman would be flaunting that many jewels on her dress, but I figure that if I just tack them on, I can always take them off and bring the kirtle down a class or two.
I tried taking pictures of the jewels but our digital camera is not cooperating.
I've been bad for the last 3 months and haven't worked on this site, because our internet connection was so slow it was almost silly. But now we have high-speed internet, so I will do a bit of a re-cap of this dress(which i finished back at the beginning of April) for those who like to read such things...
I ended up using almost ALL of the velvet I bought, I had about 1/2 a yard left over. I got lazy and serged the big sleeves together. The sleeves are trumpet shaped(but a bit more..square), and I put the seam on the side back of the arm, because the sleeves tended to twist strangely when the seam was in the "normal" position. Although...the sleeves STILL twist a little funny...oh well. I blame it on the fabric.
The bodice was pretty simple. I draped a pattern on my duct tape dummy, who was wearing the corset and kirtle. Duct tape dummy must be a bit squishier than me, because it ended up almost too small. My mom just has to lace it really tightly. Speaking of lacing, I chose to do the ladder lacing style, because the hand-bound eyelets and everything show in the back and in my opinion a single horizontal lace looks better than a single diagonal lace. The bodice is interlined with a coarse, heavy linen, and lined with 3.5 oz linen that I dyed brown. I finished the edges of the bodice with some linen bias tape I made, which i hand-stitched to the lining. There is not a single raw seam in the bodice or sleeves. There are some in the skirt, because I wasn't about to line already-heavy velvet. I will probably cover those seams in bias tape if I ever get around to it.
The skirt is huge, and is made up of 4 trapezoid pieces--a full 60" width for the front and side fronts, a 30" width for each side back, and a 60" width for the back. There is a very nifty train in the back that turned out a bit longer than I was expecting, which was good, because it looks awesome ;) The skirt is cartridge pleated to the bodice, and unlike the kirtle which i had to re-do a couple of times, the pleats on this skirt worked the first time! I just used the width of my thumb for pleat spacing. In a bout of historical-correctness I decided to hand-hem the. All 180" of it(actually there's more because the trapezoids are curved at the bottom...). Its a good thing i like hand sewing.
The inner sleeves were a challenge. I discovered that pleating dupioni was easy, but making it stay that way was not. Especially when dealing with 2 layers of the stuff. I ended up stitching the pleats together on the lining side in such a way that it its not visible.
Acessories:
I made a french hood from the directions on Drea Leed's site. It think it turned out pretty nice. I made a veil from some black silk crepe de chine I have thats waiting to become an Edwardian skirt. I decorated the hood with the same gold swarovski things, alternated with 5 pearls.
I also made a girdle out of the black silk, which has a black tassel on the end of each tail. A strand of pearls also hangs with the girtle. I thought the fabric sash would be a bit more original that the "jewels and pearls on a string with cross on the end" that you see pretty often. Not to mention cheaper.
Jewelry:
With only about 4 days to go, I made a trip to Sam Moon(great place...can sometimes find nice costume stuff there...buried among the glitzy junk) and came away with a BIG fake ruby pendant with smaller matching earrings, a 3-strand pearl choker, and a gold chain. How do these become Tudor jewelry, you ask? Well, first i took the pearl necklace apart. Then i wired the earrings(with posts removed) onto either side of the big ruby and attached a teardrop pearl to each of the "gems". Looks a lot like the stuff in portraits! I attached the whole thing to a choker made from the gold swarovski things and pearls(same pattern as the french hood). The long gold chain went around my neck and sort of down into the bodice.
Note: by the time I started working on the hood and jewelry and such, I only had about a week to finish this thing for the 4-H fashion show! Yes, it was crazy, and no, I did not get *everything* Ihad planned finished. But it was close enough! I won at County(although i was the only one in my division :) and then at District, and am going to State level in a couple weeks!
