Kampfrau (Trossfrau)

Re-jiggering the Blue

Note the lack of support of my girls. Must fix.
In May I wore the dress to my brother’s wedding. It worked out wonderfully.. but I noticed that the bodice fit a bit more loose than I’d like. Add to that, the velvet ribbons I used for the guards on the bodice seem to be shredding and in some cases tore when the dress stretched under the guards (I’m not seeing this same problem on the sleeves so I’ll leave those alone).

In June, when I got home, I made a mockup of my bodice pattern out of some heavy cotton I had for patterning and I fiddled with it until I got rid of the looseness. BUT then I had to prep for Pennsic.. and as much as I love the Blue dress, there’s no way that I’d be able to wear a heavy wool dress at Pennsic (90+ F degrees humid in Pennsylvania). So the blue dress went on the back burner.

Jump forward 3 months.. it’s now post-Pennsic and I’ve decided I want to wear the blue dress at October Crown.


Luckily my arm is strategically placed.. because otherwise you would see the non-supportiveness going on there.

When I re-fit the bodice pattern it turned out I only needed to fiddle with the front seam. That’s very convenient as it makes it easy to re-do this dress without having to disassemble it completely.

Over the last two nights I removed the hook/eye and black velvet guards from the front opening of the dress, opened up the front seams and trimmed the front edges back to the right size. Tonight I plan to temporarily attach the hook/eye by machine so that I can try on the dress to confirm the fitting before I get too far into this change. I’ll sew the hook/eye into the dress so that it’s offset from the front edge by about 1/2 inch (the seam allowance I need to turn inside to make the front edge of the dress).

Assuming the bodice works with that placement then I’ll tuck the seam allowance of the wool and the linen lining in between those two layers and do the final attachments by hand of the hook/eye to the front of the dress. Lastly I will replace the black velvet guards along the front of the dress.

Oh.. In the picture on the top-right you can clearly see the collar of my hemd is “funny”. I had originally wanted to do honeycomb pleating on that.. but when I did that the collar got too small (/grumble).. so at this point I’ve decided it will stay a flat collar and I may add some blackwork to it later… Regardless, I have added bone bead buttons and button loops to the collar so it will be less “funny”.

To-do list:
– (done) Machine attach hook/eye for test fitting
– (done) Sew up each side of the front.
– (done) Hand sew hook/eye down
– (done) Attach black velvet guards.
– (in progress) fix/replace the rest of the guards on the bodice.

[Edited to add:]
I wore this at October Crown. It looked lovely. Her Highness Esmeralda took a lovely shot of me and Fearghus as we came in for Invocation. I think it’s nice and supportive now. I’m very pleased.

Processing into October Crown Invocation
Tagged

1 thought on “Re-jiggering the Blue

  1. Hi, how might I find out what might have been fashionable in Switzerland in the 1580-1590?
    Although i suppose my character could be wearing a really old fashioned dress…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.