My fancy, fancy dress!!

Now that life has settled down into it's new normal, I realize that I have a backlog of blog posts! This one dates back to the beginning of May when the Haute Couture Club of Chicago had it's annual fashion show.

Wendy and I at a charity gala in Chicago.

I had several entries for the show but this one is by far one of my favorite and one of my biggest projects successfully completed. In my last In the Sketchbook post you saw the evolution of the sketches that led up to this final design. 

The design is all mine and the pattern was totally self drafted. I started out with my bodice master pattern and my skirt master pattern and figured out how to merge them into one with a little guidance from Sarah Veblen... hah!! who am I kidding!! It was a lot of guidance and it sure was good! I learned sooooooo much from this project. 

Muslin number 1.
Very first try from merging the bodice and skirt master patterns together.

Muslin number 3, I think... There were about a total of 6 muslins. 

Close to the end of the muslin stage.
This shows the final neckline I decided to go with.

I had multiple fashion fabrics, underlinings and linings and overlays... Lots and lots of handbasting and then a lot of handsewing. Almost as much if not more than the amount in my french jacket!

The main fabric of the dress was a superfine dark grey wool with a red pinstripe with the Savile Row  of London woven in the selvedge. Each panel of the princess lined dress was underlined with black silk organza to give it an extra bit of body. The 'V' insert was done with red silk georgette and the entire dress was lined entirely in red china silk except for the godets.

Fashion fabric from Savile Row via A Fabric Place in Baltimore and
the black organza hand basted to each piece. 

The godets along the hem of the dress were designed with the sizes graduating from the skinniest in the side fronts to the widest and longest in the center back. This gave a feeling of movement and the look of a slight train. Each godet was cut out of a layer of red silk organza with laser cut black scuba hand sewn to it. each of these were basted into the godet, sewn, trimmed and then the lining was hand stitched to the edge of each godet. 

Godets. I used the actual mislin pieces for my pattern pieces. Each piece of laser cut scuba was hand stitched to the organza in 1" spaced zig-zag rows so you could not see the stitching.

The jacket was self drafted from my master jacket pattern.. I was very careful with the front neckline so that you had a peek of the red silk georgette. The front bodice and the back yoke used a red and black circular jacquard with the laser cut scuba overlaid and hand stitched on and faced with the jacquard. the sleeves and the back were cut from red silk organza and again covered with the laser cut scuba and lined in red silk organza.

Sooooo much hand stitching!!

This was such an enjoyable garment to design and create!

I wore this at the HCCC fashion show 2017, Never in My Wildest Dreams.

Kind of a weird angle shot from the student photographer at the HCCC show. 

On the runway!

I wore this outfit to a charity gala in Chicago in June. I also plan on wearing it to the Opera. So exciting to have beautiful clothes to wear!

More Catch-up blog posts on their way!

Happy Sewing!

Princess Victoria taking time to smell the flowers!