Robe à la Française - the dress

Previous:Robe a la francaise - petticoat&panier

Making this dress was a new kind of challenge for me. First of all - the amount of fabric I cut out. So, as I had that great simplicity pattern, I was quite confident that I will follow the instructions and it cannot go wrong. I was wrong - sadly I found the instructions to be hard to understand and they seemed to skip steps that were important. 

I started with making the bodice part. For the lining inside I used again that really strong linen I have. The trick for me was to deal with the rivets and applying them. I had never done that before (or.. more precisely, I have never succeeded on applying them) but I did managed it after getting myself a different kind of applier (the one where you put the rivet and fabric between some kind of plastic thing and hit it with the hammer). The only problem was that in order to get the rivets applied, I had to apply a lot of force and it hurt the plastic applier and rivets started to move inside it. Therefore, i had to get a new one before this project was done.

Anyway, the bodice. It also contained the most interesting part of the dress: draping. The pattern had it's own guide but it felt not draped enough. Also, I put much more fabric into the draping part than the pattern suggested. I sewed together two widths of the fabric (so, in the end, the width of drapes should be 3 meters) and used much nicer guide I found online. That method gave me really nice result. (even thought I spent hours on the floor, trying to pin it..)

But having so many layers of the fabric over itself was hard for the sewing machine. I broke one needle I think and then poor machine needed to go to repair shop (and I borrowed my mom's machine meanwhile to finish) as it started to make horrible sounds :S

Also, I got some weird mismatch with the pattern at this point. The part of the dress coming over the shoulder and connecting front and back did not fit and I was totally confused. I did some hocus-bocus and made it fit but it hurt me later.

I actually think that draping part was the hardest on technical side. Rest was just sewing really long lines.

bodice on the mannequin

So, next part was the skirt part of the dress. The hardest part of this was making the jags at the top to fit. I do not think it came out perfect and I had to take into account that I made the dress narrower than the pattern. Anyway, I managed to attach the skirt part and make the front stitch (even thought something weird was still going on there with extra fabric that I did not understand why it was there)

Dress is starting to look like dress :D (and the hat makes a first appearance, more of it later)

And the back..

So, next step were the sleeves and when after finishing the bodice, process was fast, the sleeves hurt me. First, I tried to follow the pattern and make sleeves have two sides and gather it all together but it felt so stiff and really robust and the gathering did not looked nice (also, it was hell trying to sew it)

adding sleaves (and my necklace arrived.. it was little wrong color but it looks gorgeous)

Anyway, I realized this is not going to work and as I was running out of fabric, I had to unstitch the sleeves. A lot of work hours. I decided to take a break from the sleeves and work on the stomacher. I was running quite on the time, so I had no time to take huge embroidering project as I started to like the idea of using the same green fabric for stomacher and have silver embroilment (floral deco) on it. I tried to find stitching machine but apparently there was none among my acquaintances. I thought going to the shop where they offered embroilment service but it was so so expensive that I decided to drop the idea and make stomacher simply from the silver fabric I also used for the petticoat. It was more simple than I first thought but it was fine and I always have the idea that I will make the green embroiled one later (one year later, it hadn't happened).

Stomacher took many long hours, adding silver atlas ribbon at the sides, having strong linen at the back with glue fabric. And then I added huge black snaps (small ones, i was afraid, are not going to hold it) to hold the stomacher at place. That process took many tries as the mannequin (even if carefully calibrated) was not suitable for fitting those in place. So, it was adding one snap at the time, making one side fit and then making the other side. I think it was two nights, watching tv and sewing snaps.

Stomacher is added

So, I was still trying to avoid the sleeves and I went to make the under-dress from really nice and thin linen fabric. I googeled about under-dressed of that time and decided to go with really simple method. It was supposed to be rectangle and then triangles at the side but I was lazy again and combined them together so I would have less stitching.

(oh no... horrible drawings again)

Under-dress being made

Also, I started to work more on the details on the dress. I found really nice ribbon from the shop that was almost has wide as the stitch at the front of the dress. I combined it with cordon ribbon I had planned to use before.

And I got some really nice lace for the underdress side of the sleeves.

So, making that ribbon and sewing the underdress - it all took me less than a day (it was one very successful Saturday)

So, results so far:

Underdress and corset alone

Panier and petticoat are added

Dress with ribbon and stomacher has got some frill-ribbon to make it little more sophisticated

So, then, it was back to the sleeves as everything else was mostly done.I did some googeling and found amazing blog about really fancy robe a la francaise and she had made brilliant looking sleeves:

http://starlightmasquerade.com/taupe-robe-a-la-francaise-sleeves-done/

So, I decided to go with something similar. I sadly did not had any better way to work the hard egdes of the fabric rather than introduce fabric to some heat (candle) - I tried using small zic-zac from sewing machine but it looked horrible. It made the fabric (yup, reminding me that most of the fabrics we wear are plastic) melt nicely and made sure there is not going to be spliting. 

 This time it worked much better. I did the gathering manually (instead of using machine like on my first try) and made it worked. And that actually was it. I sadly have no pictures of the finished dress before the larp (nor actually from the larp - except big group photo where the dress can hardly be seen).

And I am actually glad I had so much time to make the dress. I was able to work on it with normal schedule and I finished just before leaving to the larp. It took me 2.5 months but I still think it was all worth it.

(there is going to be another post.. about the hat)