Sunday, March 16, 2014

Finished-- For Now...

I finally had some time to take pictures of my solo dress.  It's "finished" for the moment, but I already have ideas for new additions.


Here's the earlier version, for comparison purposes:



As you can see, the minor changes I made really made a difference in the overall appearance of the dress.

The waist was dropped by means of a basque, which I hand-stitched to the bodice of the dress.  I am very happy with the way that I achieved a modern silhouette  while maintaining the soft drape of the skirt.  The beauty of black velvet is that it absorbs so much light that you can't really see the seams. I weighted the center point with a fishing weight to hold it down but allow the underskirt to move freely.


I am very happy with the design of the leather and ribbon on the shoulders-- I think it enhances the rather martial look of the dress and reinforces the Gondor theme.  However, because it's on a 3d surface and I didn't have access to my dressform when I was stitching it I ended up with some obvious wrinkles, and didn't quite catch the top in the collar seam allowance.  I think I will simply have to take it off and stitch it again.



The collar, by the bye, looks terrible simply because I haven't clipped the seam allowances yet, as I am still experimenting with the shape and I also plan on doing some embroidery eventually.


I finally figured out why the sleeves wrinkle oddly, despite having a new layer of interfacing-- the sleeve cap is much too shallow, so the sleeve wants to sit at the wrong angle, like so:


The only solution is to take the sleeve off and draft another one that naturally hangs vertically.  Luckily I have plenty of leftover glitterball.  While the sleeve is off I will be able to fix the leather a bit, and maybe make an embroidered cuff that would bring a little pop of the red from the cape and skirt lining into the rest of the dress.

While I was sewing on the dress I also fixed some puckery darts, reinforced the stitching on the cape, and fixed the problem with the funny draping on the skirt.  I danced at an event last Friday, but my mom was only able to get a few blurry pictures, so that's no good.



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