Marathon of Sewing

Positioning the lace over-skirt

Thursday was a marathon day of sewing on the dress. With the Tour de France in the background, we started the day with Jenny finishing hand sewing the gown's hem. Stephanie and I worked on the construction of the straps in the meantime.

Once the hem was done (beautifully stitched!) We started work on finishing the lace over-skirt. We needed to applique the scallops to the train, and that took quite a bit of doing and redoing. There is so much fabric to work with, and nowhere in the house to lay it all out, it felt impossible to see what we were doing. I found myself wishing we were back in my classroom using the tables--not to mention the lighting in the classroom is ten times better. We manufactured a raised pouf out of a footstool, pillows and the table. This gave us some height to lay out the lace on so we could see what we were doing.

Once we got the scallops figured out, we hand tacked them on just in case they still needed adjusting and we sewed the skirt to the gown. We did get a bit carried away with the length of the train and needed to rethink our design. For a bit, the idea of a cathedral length train seemed like a great one, until we saw Stephanie's expression, and we knew we were taking it a bit too far.

Positioning the handmade straps

This required more redoing, and we had Stephanie in and out of the dress several times to see if the lace was going on correctly, if the length of the train was good, if the shape of the train was good, and if the skirt was in the correct position on the gown.

The straps were positioned and repositioned several times as well.

The dress was closer to done that it has ever been!  All we need to do now is: sew on the button looping and buttons, sew on some hook and eye closures to be extra-double careful, tidy up the scalloped hem, create the ruching and figure out where that goes on and how, tidy up how the straps are sew on, tack down the lining in places, create the pick-ups, sew on the flowers, and create a bustle for the train. Okay, that's still a lot, but it's a lot of little stuff. We are so close! 

Confident that we could do much of it tomorrow, we packed up our sewing and released the groom from captivity in the family room.