New Dress!

This here is my favourite dress, generally referred to as the orange dress. It is based on a drawing of a Victorian chemise, and this is where the neckline comes from in particular, but the ruffle I added myself. A chemise of the time would be white linen or cotton most likely.


I like to wear it over some kind of top and some tights, and is more-or-less my ideal outfit as I have discovered I don't really like trousers that much., but this still keeps you warm.

I am making some stays and had wanted to finish them to wear to Gwri's work dinner, but we had thought the dinner was on Saturday and when we discovered it was really on Friday I didn't have enough time. But on Thursday evening I had enough time to modify the pattern for the orange dress and make this new dress, all in 3.5 hours. I shortened the orange dress, widened the straps, shortened the upper back, widened the skirt very slightly and added a different kind of ruffle - the ruffle is actually twice as long at the back as the front and looks very cool.


The main fabric is some I had tried to make into a different dress ages ago but it didn't work out, so I reused some of it in this one as I thought it was a bit more fancy looking for a work dinner. The ruffle is a cotton sateen which is a shiny cotton which is a very nice fabric and work particularly well in red (the shinyness doesn't work so well in some colours).

The original orange dress pattern is one I made myself based on a pattern block from Handford's book, but I had to make modifications myself to remove the darts as none of the books have instruction to make a relatively fitted no-dart pattern block like this one. Unfortunately I can't entirely remember how I made the no-dart block. It is very useful however for historical clothing where they didn't use any darts or any other fancy shaping but you want to make something that is your size and not completely shapeless.

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