Tuesday 27 May 2014

A small thing I threw together at work

So at work we are updating parts of our summer exhibit, which is all about metals and minerals, but in ways you might not expect. It's also very much aimed towards children, which means simple things that are more about giving a feeling than perfection. Now in the part about gold we have put in a gold throne, and we also had a small child mannequin that we didn't really know what we should do with it. Well we decided to turn it into a princess and place her beside the throne. Of course it was me who had to dress up the princess. This was quite a challenge for several reasons. The first one was that I didn't have any working scissors, any cutting would have totally ravaged the fabrics. The fabrics I had to work with was a big table cloth and some gold netting. The only thread I could find was black, so I had to do something that wouldn't involve very much stitching. After some time trying to gather the table cloth and turn it into a dress I realized that I also had some other fabric. I had donated a full bag of scraps from my Amidala purple travel gown, nothing that I can use for myself, but big enough scraps to use in the exhibit.

I started with simply wrapping the scrap of velvet around the doll, and attach it with some stitches in the back.

 I then pleated the gold netting into a little skirt that was sewn to the velvet.
Then it was time to do something with the table cloth. The table cloth was really big, so I had to figure out a way to reduce the fabric. In the end I decided to go with a robe francaise inspired thing, so I made stacked box pleats in the back until it was narrow enough, I then wrapped the loose ends of the table cloth around the arms to create sleeves, and I had some kind of robe, with a very long train.

You can see the pleating in the back, that's actually the part I'm most happy about, but I don't think many visitors will notice it.




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