Dress of the Court of Saxony

Well it happened. Purgatorio occured. I got lots of compliments. I took a camera but of course completely forgot to take any pictures. I’m hoping other people took pictures and post them in the next few days.
The dress was wearable.. and even relatively comfortable. It wasn’t as hot as I feared it might be. The only thing I found uncomfortably hot was the bottom part of the sleeves. Close fitting linen+wool sleeves were stifling hot. Because of time constraints I did the bottom part of the sleeve without any ruffles. I think the ruffles might actually have made the sleeves less hot.
Learnings:

  • The strain across the dress made the boned edges of the brown part of the dress flip outwards. This made it so the brown inner lining was showing along the edge between the white insert and the yellow front trim. As a temporary measure one of my camp mates added a tack stitch to one side.. but I don’t think that’s a good long term solution. I’ll need to consider it for a while before I can come up with a good long term soluton.
  • The skirt hook at the bottom of the front edge kept coming unhooked. Also here I’ll need to consider it a while before I can come up with a good long term solution.
  • The side-front bones poked me in the underarm when I sat down. I think at the top they’re placed too far back. I’ll need to make the angle there more shallow.
  • Mari chatted with me for a little while and said that the waist of the dress is possibly a little bit too low. She indicated a spot that would be at my bottom most rib on the side as where the actual waist of the dress should be. I don’t know if this also means that the back should be also raised. Will consider for a while.
  • The top half of my sleeves are too long. I think I measured this to the outside elbow as opposed to the inner crook of the arm. This made the bottom half of my sleeves droop. I’ll have to play with this to see if I can shorten the top of the sleeves without completely eliminating the unruffled brown part (and see if I have enough wool to redo this part). I think the bottom gold edge of the top half of the sleeve was too long as well.
  • The skirt is definately too long. I kirtled it up most of the day but it’d be nice to be able to wear it down. Hopefully the shortening of the bodice will take up most of the “too long” part of the skirt.
  • I now remember why I stopped wearing the shoes I wore on Saturday. After my feet went numb it was much better.. but I hobbled around a lot on Sunday. I need to stretch the leather of those shoes, especially the left one right across the knuckle of the toes.
  • I don’t like the look of the rolled pleats. They unrolled and sat weird. I talked with Etaine about the pleats briefly. My experience with cartridge pleats up to this point have all be small pleats… 1/8-1/2 inch. Etaine indicated that you could get the large rolling pleats if you took deeper stitches 1-2 inches and if you attached that to the waist of the dress with 3-4 stitches at the top of each roll.. then the cartridge pleats would be wider at the waist of the garment. I think I’ll do that when I re-attach the skirt.

I borrowed a hat from Etaine. All was well.

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