I had an afternoon tea this Saturday, and hoped to debut Polly Oliver at it.

On Friday, I was doing great: ahead of schedule even.  Felicity was helping.

You didn’t need to cut where my paw is, right?  

I had all my pieces cut: apron, over-train, bottom pleat/over layer (not sure how to describe it).  I lined them, finished them, and had them all ready to attach to the skirt and assemble.

I started by pinning the bottom pleat/over layer on.  It’s quite short in the back, over the skirt hoops, where it will be covered by the long over/train, and longer in the front where the apron will sweep up and reveal bits of the under skirt.

As with the 1886 dress in Janet Arnold, there is a part layer of good fabric over the original support layer.  Based on my inspiration images, mine has a  slit showing the red under-fabric.  I’m not entirely pleased with how the part layer is hanging at the moment, but I’m hoping that the buttons can be used to hold everything neatly in place.

It took a LOT of pinning, and re-pinning, and re-adjusting to get everything to hang as well as it is!

I finished up Friday evening by sewing the pinned over-layer on to the skirt base, and re-inserting my hoop bones.  Then I pinned the skirt and all the layers on to the dress form just to see how it looked.

I didn’t take a photo of that, so here is another one of Felicity hogging the fabric:

As it happened, Felicity hogging the fabric is a lot cuter than the pinned together skirt was.  And the burn-out photo shows just as much definition and detail as the pinned together skirt did.  All the layers just merged together into one white blob, without the distinct layers that I wanted.

Ergh.  What’s a girl to do?

Scramble some eggs!

I bought all this gold trim for the Polly / Oliver jacket, but it just didn’t look right when I tried it.  However, on the white, in a large expanse of space, a trim of it was just the thing to provide the detail and definition I wanted.

My trim is a little more omelet than scrambled eggs: I kept it quite simple other than a bit of curves at the front of the apron, and the corners of the over-train.

To make my trimming, I drew a scroll pattern as a pattern, and used transfer paper to mark it on to the apron front.

Then I drew on the rest of the lines with a chalk pen and a ruler, while trying to keep Felicity amused/out of the way.

Then there was some 17+ metres of gold trim to stitch on, and the 5 hours that I had allocated to finishing the skirt were passed, and it was time to get dresses for my afternoon tea, and clearly I wasn’t wearing Polly / Oliver.  So I debuted the 1903 Chinoiserie skirt, and I’m finishing Polly Sat eve/Sunday morning, aiming for a Sun afternoon photo shoot.

But I’m glad I took the time to do the skirt right, because it looks so much better, even just pinned together.

But maybe it needs more scrambled eggs….

Just a little…