Grey Dress: Now Wearable!

All right, so the hand sewing on this dress took a lot of time.  Yesterday and today I catch-stitched the rest of the skirt seams, catch-stitched the waist seam allowances upwards, slip-stitched the bodice lining to the waist-line seam.  Pressed, folded and slip stitched the front slit, overcast the hem, catch-stitched the hem without pressing the hem fold, fitted and stitched the shoulder straps, added hanging loops, and fitted and attached ribbons for the little French bustle in the back.  I also finished sewing the belt and added the buckle.  All that I have left is to attach the crystals to the straps (there will be 72, more below), replace the buttons on the jacket, cover the shoulder pads with silk, sew in the shoulder pads, figure out how to finish the hem stitching and finish it (using a bias strip of silk??), and press the whole gown.  Here are some photos of the gown in its current state.  Note that the bra I'm wearing is not the one I fitted the muslin with.  It's a problem that I need to fix tomorrow, as well.  The bra I used for the fittings shows through this fabric, so I need to find an alternative.  This one won't work for several reasons.

 Okay, so for the straps I'm placing the crystals randomly, with the help from random.org.  Each strap is approximately 15 inches long, and each crystal is 0.25 inches.  So, that's 60 positions per strap.  From Random.org I got a series of 240 random integers from 0 to 100. Since I want more crystals closer to the dress and none at the shoulders themselves, and more on the front than the back, I then applied a weighting factor to each number depending on where on the strap it would be.  I then made a threshold number such that any value below the number had no crystal at that position and a value about that cutoff had a crystal.  Here are images of the straps:

Neat, huh?