Dress diary: The Green One

 

 Ahhh... my green wool dress. This gave me no end of troubles. First, I cut off a bit I wasn't supposed to. Then, it was much, much too tight on the sides.

But...it's done now, and probably just needs a bit of trim to make it nice, though it's fine as-is.

This dress is made of 100% wool, with the torso lined with a dark blue linen remnant I got from Spotlight. It may not be period but it's pretty useful in making sure that the green dress doesn't stick to whatever I'm wearing underneath.

So, as I wrote about in a previous post, this was a green wool I got for $20/m from the (now-closed) Super Cheap Fabrics in Fitzroy.

Its cutting plan was fairly standard as far as my cutting plans go. There's a front and a back and some gores and some sleeves...and a bit of excess at the top of where the front and back were cut. Oh, and a nice large area that I could use for Something Else.

See? Excess at the top.

This is where I first ran into trouble. You see, by the time I'd started cutting, it was late at night, and I was tired. This is never a good idea, and I shall tell you why, dear reader. That excess at the top? I thought I hadn't yet cut it off, so I happily chopped it off. Only to realize when I held it against my body that no....that wasn't extra. That was supposed to stay attached.

Shit.

What would medieval people do? They'd fix it, that's what. Nobody would just throw away a perfectly good body piece that had a good eight or ten inches chopped off where it shouldn't have been. It's daft. (They probably would've put it into a different garment but as there are no short children in my SCA life that I sew for, I didn't exactly have that option.) So I stitched it back on with as small a seam allowance as I could get away with. I used a backstitch because no way in hell did I want that to come off again, and then I tacked down the seam allowance with a herringbone stitch (not period, but hey, it works) so it wouldn't be noticeable from inside the dress.

As mentioned in my earlier description of the dress, there's a blue linen lining the torso of it. I basted it on good and proper, with long diagonal stitches, and treated it and the green wool as one fabric. Once the dress was fully together, I pulled out all the basting except around the neck, which when I finally get around to making a trim for it, will be covered by said trim.

How's it hangin'?

I hung it up to let the hem fall before I hemmed it. And then I realized something. The torso was about four inches too small, because my bust is ten centimeters smaller than my shoulders are. 

Once more, with vigor: Shit.

And again, what would medieval people do? FIX IT. So I took some of the offcuts and created side panels, pointed at the top so I didn't have to deal with adding a gusset too. (I don't have photos of it, but it's not pretty. It's functional and it does what it needs to, but it's not pretty at all.)

Of course, I realized that on the way up to Festival, and I ended up having to fix it before I could wear it on the day I had the Hangover from Hell. (I didn't write about that, did I? Gonna have to retcon that. It'll be there someday.) But I got to wear it for the first time ever at Festival, and I was happy as hell about it.

And then it was College War time, and I got to wear it again. And without my cloak (it was cold, shush) and with the blue wool underdress (which I don't think I'm actually wearing in this picture, not that you can tell), especially once it's had its sleeves 'wrinkled' at the wrist, it's 100% Pre-Norman. Or at least 75%. I love it. It's so warm!

So very happy. And with my apron, too!