Lady Poe assembled

My last post was about my favorte part of the costuming process, but right after that comes my least favorite part. It is the part when it's time to assemble and sew it all together. The mistakes you make in this part are not as easily adjusted or hidden as everything else you have done up until now. I defnitely hit a motivational hurdle, I was afraid that after all the work I have done, the gown wouldn't fit.

Well I had to push through that an tonight it was time to get everything on and finally start seeing what the gown will look like on me, and not on the dressform.

When I had struggled to get everything on I could do a sigh of relief. I can get everything on by myself. There were some casualties, one of the straps on my stays was ripped off and I also tore a bit of the waist seam on the robe, so I will have to reattach those. Overall I am satisfied with it, but there is still a lot of work to do. One thing I was really worried about was the length of the robe and petticoat. I have really tried to use as little fabric as possible, and I was worried that it was going to be short. It is on the short side and would have looked even better with a few extra cm, but it will work. I will hem it with a hem facing, so that I don't have to do any double folds and loose any cm to the hem.

I am thinking that the robe opens up too much over the petticoat. I like the look, but I don't think I have enough fabric to be able to trim such a big piece of the petticoat. If I make the opening smaller, then maybe I can make some trim on the petticoat as well.

The sleeves are good, but I actually have to adjust my shift. The sleeves on the shift are longer than the sleeves on the robe, and the bunch under the outer sleeve. I think the sleeves will sit better with another shift. I need to go and see if I can find another shift, or if I need to shorten and take in the sleeves on the shift that I'm using.

I haven't posted about the petticoat, so here are some details of that. I wanted to save as much fabric as possible, so I decided to only use my silk for the front of the petticoat, the back is made from a grey cotton sateen.

If Madame Pompadour could use cheap fabric on the invisible parts of her petticoats, then I can do that as well. The back is made of a width of fabric (150 cm). The front is made of two widths of the silk, so in total 200 cm. I have sewed fake seam lines in the middle of each width of silk to mimic the period width of silks (50 cm).

The skirt is pleated into a waistband of cotton tape. Normally I would have hidden the cotton tape behind the fabric, but I want to save every mm of length so I made the waist tape the top of skirt instead.

On the back of the tape I have sewed a more narrow cotton tape over the raw edge of the silk, to protect it and keep it from fraying.

The next step of the process is to cut out and attach the sleeve ruffles and the stomacher. Those are the last irregular pieces of fabric, after that I will now how much fabric I will be able to use for trim. I will first trim the edges of the robe, and then when I see how much is left I can do the petticoat. In a worst case I will have an untrimmed petticoat. The stomacher will have contrasting fabric for decoration.

I will of course also have to fix the seams that I ripped while getting dressed.