Back to the Wedding Dress!

Well, if you want to read anything about my wedding dress in my blog, you now have to go back several months!  Until today...  This weekend I got straight to work on my wedding dress again, because if I learned anything from my grey dress project, it was that the hand sewing on a nice gown takes A LOT of time.  This weekend, I first unpacked finally from California, cleaned up my apartment, and then got to work.  First off, I tried on my muslin again.  I've been working out, and while I haven't lost a lot of weight, I thought it would be pretty silly to not at least check where I am with the fit.  It was indeed a tad bit looser, and so I have incorporated the need for a fitting into my mental picture of the next few months of sewing.  I thought to myself, "How will I ever be able to get all the handsewing done if I want to wait as long as possible to do the last fitting?"  The answer I came up with was to (nothing revolutionary here) do almost all of the overcasting after I've got the seams basted together before the final fitting.  I'll still have the clipping of the curved seams and all the catchstitching to do, but I'll be able to save quite a bit of time by finishing at least the overcasting beforehand. 

I counted, there are 62 pieces of fabric in my dress: that's 14 for the 2 layers of the foundation, 7 for the lining of the foundation, 7 of the foundation, 12 for the ruffles (13 for me b/c I changed my plan for the colors and had to piece one of the segments), 14 for the dress and underlining, and 7 for the overdress.  Then there's the wrap (and veil, if I decide to do one).  Wow.  For the grey dress, there were 17 for the dress and 9 for the coat, so that's only 26 total.  Moral of the story: I have a lot of work to do.

So, this weekend, I disassembled the muslin, pressed it, and cut out the foundation cotton broadcloth, tulle ruffles, silk crepe de chine lining pieces, silk charmeuse dress pieces, and started on the silk organza dress underlining and overdress pieces.  Phew!  Here are some photos:

The disassembled muslin.

The foundation muslin and two sets of broadcloth pieces.

The ruffles.

The cut lining crepe de chine pieces.

So, from the pattern envelope, I needed 6 yards of charmeuse.  I bought 8 just to be sure I had enough, and boy did I ever need it.  You can see I had NO extra at the end of the fabric.  I don't know what I would have done if this miracle hadn't occurred.  The charmeuse was the most expensive fabric I bought. Yikes!

All right, so that's all for now.  I have to say that I loved cutting into these beautiful fabrics.  I'd almost started envisioning myself in a muslin, markered up dress with all the wrong color threads!  Nice fitting as the muslin is, the idea of a lighter weight dress with the wonderful textures of silk is more appealing.