As in my previous post, there are a couple inspiration dresses for my vigil Cotehardie. My heraldry is also playing a major part in the design of my dress.
With these details in mind, the design started to take shape. One side is going to be green and white linen stripes and the other side is to be green linen stamped with thistles.
There is no source for already striped linen in the widths that I'd want so my friend Amy and I made striped fabric. The widths were set at 4" so the final product has stripes of 3" since a half inch is taken off at each side. We started with just individual strips of green and white and started combining them to make 4 yards of fabric. Since I was planning on doing angled stripes, I knew I needed 4-5 yards of fabric for the pattern that I used. This was absolutely the most mind numbing, tedious part of the whole project.
The next step was to cut out the half of the dress that was going to have the angled stripes. Christy, who is an amazing costumer, came over to help with the cutting and putting together that side of the dress.
Cutting out the pieces was the hardest part ensuring that each piece had the angles correct. Once the very first piece was cut out, that established the angles for the rest. We time we cut, we would lay the previous piece on the fabric to get the angle right and then cut it out against the pattern.
We got all the pieces cut out (only making a mistake on one piece that required a recut. Score!) and got the gores cut out and sewn in except the tops. We needed to let the dress hang a bit before hand sewing the gores in to ensure that the angles were correct. Christy was able to get the side seam to match perfectly which is totally witchcraft.
