Frock Chick

Sierra Boggess shared this image yesterday and can you see what has made me so excited? The fabric is thin. Well fairly thin- the flash and angle allows us to see her skin across the arm while the fabric looks more opaque closer to the armscye (where the fabric turns and follows the curve of her shoulder.) The sleeves are either unlined or lined with something very fine while the bodice is flat lined in a solid white.

I tend to double line my bodices and either not line or line my sleeves in a very thin material too.

Also if you follow the lines of the fabric on her sleeve you can see how very shallow the sleeve head is. This is both era appropriate and theatre appropriate as it means you can get your arms over your head. Notice the small wrinkles between shoulder and armscye? Yep. Modern patterns try to eliminate that by using a very tall sleeve head and that is what gives us limited arm range.

The effort to make a garment look good on the stand makes for a garment that is far less practical.

Anyway, just my thought process when I look at new/different images of the same garment 🙂 It’s all about the fit.

Oh and there is probably a bit of ease in the top of the sleeve head, I use three rows of stitches to do this rather than two as it does makes the fine gathers almost invisible.

Happy birthday to @andrewlloydwebber!!!!! So grateful you are on this planet!!!

A post shared by Sierra Boggess (@officialsierraboggess) on Mar 22, 2017 at 5:51am PDT

This project is super long term and matches my Elissa gown for length of time since starting!

However the skirt is finally getting the lace flounces! I decided to just go ahead and make this like the show gowns which is to not use my delicate vintage lace but a lovely net lace that I removed colour from 🙂 This has left the net ever so slightly pink and the flowers arctic white. The dress is a very creamy crepe and there will be opalescent organza (vintage- it’s not the super slick stuff now) and there will be some pearled lace appliques and ruched ribbon headings

Amazingly the lace was pretty much in the perfect lengths for full ruffles (3 times for each row)

So I started by gathering and quickly decided tiny pleats made more sense.

Not to sure how I managed to make the left side flatter, but the florist pins at the top of the skirt in the last image is where that side will be raised to before the lace is stitched down. I’d love to have used my vintage lace as it’s much wider but really I think the lace will look much better once the pins are out 🙂

So this skirt is feeling very mid 90s UK in style. Funnily enough 😉

The bodice is very much mid to late 90s UK too 😉 But you can see the organza is more subtle than more recent ones such as used in Wicked 🙂

So this has undergone many changes, a few piccies from when i first made and wore it:

This was the last iteration. Notice the wooden doors behind? Yeah that means this was before the fire. After the fire the bodice had a lot of soot damage so a lot of the hard work got undone.

Yes, when I was well I did a quickie trip to Europe and saw the show in Hamburg, London, And Copenhagen. And wore this frock each time. Long before it has become okay to cosplay at events btw. In fact this was just a few months before Rheumatoid Disease became part of my life.