Simplicity 1347 - the finished items

Two dresses in less than a week. That's not mad, right?

I did it though. Two linen Simplicity 1347s, following on from the toile shown here.

There's not a massive amount to say about these really. It's a fairly simple pattern, and once I'd made the toile and realised what needed doing, the pattern pieces were easy enough to modify.
I added 2 inches to the bottom of the two bodice pieces, and took and inch (possibly a little more) from the top of the skirt pieces. I moved all the notches and gather points, and cut it all out.

I will confess to not ironing the mauve fabric. This was probably why it was such a pain in the backside to cut. It was quite loose weave as well, and getting it to lie flat on my cutting surface (my less than level living room floor) was awkward. I just had enough fabric, thanks to the massive gaping hole in it. Would have been fine were it not for that.
In the end, I didn't use the neck lining piece, and I think I did the armhole binding weirdly, as it sticks out at funny angles.
What I did do was not sew the shoulder seams together. Instead, I did individual gathers at each shoulder, and then hand stitched a load of loops in to take some cord. I felt this looked a bit more Greek than the ordinary gathered shoulders.

It was a pain in the backside (and I hate hand sewing, especially with embroidery thread) but it looked really good. The innards are messy as hell as doing the gathers and then folding them over to have a sort of hem was fiddly and flattened quite a lot of the gathering, but once its being worn, it looks good.
I didn't hem it at this point, for reasons. Mostly laziness.

So I finished that on the Wednesday lunchtime, and then had an online gaming session in the evening. I had intended to cut the fabric for the blue version and get pinning, but the game took a bit more concentration than I thought it would, and I decided to make cake to use up some fruit I had lying around (this one, if anyone cares about tasty fruity crumble cake, make with peaches and cherries). Once the game was done, I did manage to get all the cutting done.
Just.
Turned out that this was about two inches narrower than the skirt pieces required, so they're a bit weirdly shaped, and there are now small slits in the sides.
I had nerve wrackingly used a pack of Dylon Pre-Dye on the blue fabric to try and make it less bright. There was a brief moment when it looked like the fabric was turning pink in the machine, but in the end, I managed to get it to a point where it was just that little bit less BLUE, and that was fine by me.



Before the Pre-Dye

After the Pre-Dye

 



I have a cunning tool for threading elastic through casing, it's the lead weight from the cleaning cloth I used to use for my clarinet (clarinet is fine, and the cloth was disgusting). I superglued it to the elastic and let it fall. Much easier than trying to feed thin elastic through a thin casing.

I used bias tape for the neck lining and the armholes rather than more of the linen, because it was easier. It also meant that the armholes are much neater on this one.
I did the same thing on the shoulders as with the purple, and then hemmed it.

I took about 5 inches off both of them, as I'm not the tallest person in the world, and I knew that traipsing round a field in a dress that is massively too long is never fun.
As it was, I ended up hiking the skirt up anyway, as it was incredibly muddy, and I was running around on quests in armour for some of the weekend.

I'm pretty pleased with both of them. In the end, I only wore the blue one, and by sunday I had resorted to the short chiton as things were going horribly wrong and my character was in angry war mode rather than angry priest mode (still a priest, but she had a knife).
The field was soaked, and the blue one has suffered; the hems are covered in mud, probably up to my knees. Even after washing, there's some fairly ingrained mud. I'm not too bothered, because it makes the kit look lived in.
The purple one gives slightly better cleavage coverage than the blue one, but both are better than the red one (which I still love). While I'm not likely to make more of these, I am considering nipping up the v where the bodice pieces meet slightly, just to give a little more modesty.

Sadly so far there are no photos of me in the dress, only me in the chiton being very angry.
The event was excellent, lots of terrible dramatic things happened, and I can't wait for the next one.

I'm sort of making some stuff for this weekend, but as it's not going to be live, I've kind of lost the will. We have a backup for if we can't do things up the woods, but it involves sitting round a table rolling dice, and that is not my idea of fun, especially not when the weather is nice.