Since I finished the bodice I am moving forward to the skirt and main dress. First things first, a very important step, which gets often forgotten. The math!
Before I even started I needed to calculate the whole skirt. on the picture you can see my notes. the triangles are the skirt pieces. first I wanted the front and back pieces to cover the whole waist, but when I started cutting I made the red triangles go all the way up and be part of the waistline, if that makes sense to you. ( you´ll see what I mean, in the Pictures down below)
So first i cut out the front and back piece with the Christmas fabric. This is the front one, it is the exact same for the back, with the difference that the back piece is cut in half vertically.
The I cut the side panles with that red shiny fabric ( I don´t know the professional name for it, but I often see it used as lining)
here I decided that the top should be 4cm wide instead of going together like triangle.
The next step was pretty easy, but I needed a long time, mainly because my sewing maschine isn´t the quickest. I just made French seams to connect all the panels, but left the seam on the back open at first.
The I closed the back seam, but I left 26 cm from the top open, there will be the closure.
I finished these seams in a pretty unique way, which i say on a sewing blog ( unfortunately I forgot the name of it)
For this technique you´ll need at least 2 cm seam allowance , which gets regularly sewn together. the seams will be ironed in half with the raw side to the seams, at last the edges get swn down about one mm from the edges.
After finsishing the main construction of the skirt I made another modesty panel and some bias tape out of the Christmas fabric
The modesty panel gets sewn into place, like the one on the bodice, but the edges were finished a bit differently: the edges of the modesty panel were cut down to approx. 0,5 cm. Then the Christmas fabric gets folded over it and sewn down by hand. on the other side I made a regular hem and stitched it down by hand
Now for the closures: snaps again, I sewed the on like the ones on the bodice, but with more patience and love.
Making the hem was the next thing on my schedule, by hand of course so there isn´t barely visible stitching.
After I hemmed the skirt I tried it on and it was too big, which wasn´t a problem, because I knew this before, since I cut the front and back panel to fit around my waist, but then decided to cut the red panels 4cm wider on the top ( in the end you´ll see how I fixed that)
But before connecting the skirt to the bodice, I decorated it with the gold trim I bought for this costume. First I sewed a strip next to the closures to hide the black gap.
I sewed it down with tiny whip stitches and black thread.
The I sewed two addtional straps to the front, which should look like a v-neck and add a bit of sparkle to the neckline. Here is a picture from the finished bodice
And here is the back of the bodice. I made sure that the gold trim looks like one one piece, that goes all the way down to the waist.
Then it was time to sew the bodice and skirt together aka making a dress out of a top and bottom.
I pinned everything carefully together. and kept and eye on the seams, and the middle. so everything was centered.
When it was done it looks like this.
The problem with the additional material was solved making making two tiny pleats about 4cm away from the side panel. I measured the the skirt and bodice. The excess was eliminated by making the pleats. ( I placed the ther because it makes the waist look slimmer)
I finally tried the dress on and I am really happy with the fit and how glamourous it looks.
The dress itself is completed,but I am making a matching belt with a bow and a headpiece, so there´ll be a blog post about that too, together with the final photos, which I´ll shoot tomorrow.
Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas :)
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