Actually, this post is about the skirt lining of Shell’s dress, because I foolishly neglected to take any photos of the skirt outer in progress. The skirt lining is cut to the exact same pattern as the skirt outer though, so you’ll get the idea. Because of the width of each of the four back skirt panels, and how narrow my fabric was, I had to put joins in the bottom of each skirt panel.  You can see them in the bottom right of the photo. They don’t look great on the lining, but I’m confident they will be barely noticeable in the final dress. I’m going to need to trim a lot from the skirt sides.  The train is also longer than it looks:  I have Isabelle the dress form raised to her full height. I’m in love with the dotted swiss fabric.  It’s such a lovely fabric to work with.  I wish I knew what the fibre makeup was. The spotted fabric ads a lovely, fun, touch to the dress.  You’ll just see …

While Shell’s dress is a modern wedding dress in most ways, I’m a historical seamstress.  So I’m using historical construction techniques to make the dress. This is most noticeable in the bust.  To create the perfect shaping, and to make sure that there would be no chance of nipply weather, no matter how cold the day, I corded the bust panels. Based on my previous experience with the evilness of cording, I decided to cord full pieces of fabric, and then to cut the bust panels out of those (rather than cording pre-cut panels). Shell watched me cord the first piece of fabric, and got quite excited about documenting the process. Felicity got excited about the process too.  Felicity loves Shell.  She can literally walk all over her. It was fun letting Felicity get involved.  Usually when I sew for clients I lock Felicity out of the room, and she sits outside the French doors and looks sad.  But Shell is a good friend, and loves Felicity, so kitty got to sew with me. Shell …

Construction on Shell’s dress began with draping a very basic princess-seamed bodice, and with working out some very complicated sketches for a skirt design that gets fuller as it goes back and is made out of a chiffon fabric that isn’t bias-grain seam friendly. I know.  Most unexciting drafting photos ever. The front of the skirt was a bit of a problem, because the fabric was quite narrow, and so drapey that seamlines cut on the bias tended to warp.  I needed to find a way to make the skirt very full at the hem, without minimal seamlines across the bias of the grain, and within the narrow fabric width. I drew up a few skirt front ideas: I ended up going with an option not show: cutting a narrow-ish centre front panel, and then two wide side panels, which did leave me with two very tricky almost-bias side front seams. The practical me said I should have gone with a 4th option: a half circle for the front. It wouldn’t have given quite as …