I have been working on the 1520s courtgown

 I have been posting about so many other things over the summer, but I have been working on my 1520's court gown as well. The work has been slow though. This is a tendency that I have for any big project. When it's time to finally start assemble it all into one piece, well then I get worried that it won't look good and that I will ruin all the hard work (and money) I've spent. As such I have made some stuff here and there, but now I feel that I really want to finish the gown.

In my last post I had finished the upper sleeves. The lower sleeves where done similarily, but now I also added a cuff of brown brocade.

The brocade is a reproduction of a Spanish renaissance pattern. I chose to work with a polyester brocade here, the silk brocades were simply out of my price range. I also only 1 meter of the brocade, so I try to use as little as possible. That means that I made the cuffs a bit tighter than I had planned at first. I would have preferred to have them fanning out over my hands, but once cut is cut and I can't remake that.

The last step was to make lacing holes at the ends of the sleeves so that I can tie the upper and lower parts together. Lacing holes are not my favorite,but it was so much easier to make them in the silk velvet and linen lining, compared to the heavy linen that I used for my lacing strips.

Then I attached the upper sleeves to the bodice with small back stitches. Now it was time to attach the bodice and the skirt.

I first attached the skirt to a waistband of heavy cotton tape. The opening is going to be in front, so there I made a couple of extra pleates on each side, I'm hoping that will hide the opening in the folds of the pleats.

The finished bodice is then attached with small whipstitches to the skirt, making sure to catch both the skirt fabric and the waistband. When I had spent a day doing this I tried on the gown, only to realize that the bodice was way too long with the skirt attached. Simply put I felt really fat when looking into the mirror, because the waist seam hit me where I'm at my biggest around my tummy. So it was only to rip up a days work, shorten the bodice and start again.

At the moment I'm attaching the skirt again, and I'm only hoping that I did get the measurments right for the bodice this time, since I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to redo it again. The seams leave marks on the velvet that I can't get away. I also ripped away the lacing strips and want to reattach it further in on the bodice, to make sure that the center front edges close properly, without any visible lacing between them.