Monday, December 29, 2008

The Ventian is wearable but not yet complete

Yesterday was very productive. Last time I was at liza's we marked the hem and paid a lot of strips for the sleeves but hadn't worked out how to attach them. I had completed the bodice on my own at home the same way I had been shown to do Spanish bodices. This meant that I clipped the edges of the arm holes before folding them in and whip stitching the arm holes closed. This became a problem when we went to attack the sleeves. Having closed the arm holes I had no way to slip the sleeves inside the bodice. The solution was to attach them to the outside. Here's a photo of the 14 strips I end up using with a strip of the gold braid down the centre of each. That is also the last of my 5 meters of braid. The two longer strips are the bands at the bottom of the puffy sleeves. The last of the gold braid was attached to the center of the bands after the sleeve strips were attached to the inside.


I finished machine attaching the strip sleeves then I had to hand sew the ends of the bands closed and hand sew the outer face of the band to the exposed side of the strip sleeves so that no machine sewing is visible from the outside. Except the stitches holding on the gold but the thread match is so close and shiny that it's hard to see where the stitches are. On the inside of the bodice I attached 10 brass rings to either side of the V (20 in total) and one hook and eye at the bottom to help create the V shape. Today I bought a gold rope that was as close to the colour of the braid as possible. It's amazing how many golds there are. At this point the dress is wearable but isn't complete. I still need to make the full sleeves for my lower arm which will attach with rings to the strip sleeves and I need to construct a partlet. Although cross stitch isn't period I still like the look of it and have wanted to try it for a long time. I bought a fairly small kit from spotlight but I've never been agame to touch in; I was afraid I would mess it up (I'm a perfectionist and I get very upset when things don't work). Among my Christmas presents from "Santa'' (thanks mum) was a mini cross stitch kit with a frame and everything and on top of that it's a rose (I love roses). So here is first attempt at cross stitch. I did try to start my bigger kit but I did mess it up and had to unpick a fair bit. Today I went and bought an embroidery hoop which will hopefully make the handling of the fabric easier.

1 comment:

Ysambart said...

One of the most ironic parts is that Gnomes is making a dress of similar blue with the same colour trim. Hers is a straight colour rather than your pattern, but the blues seem similar to me. It looks good!