Yay new projects to talk about!
I’m currently working on two Belle costumes for a production of Beauty and the Beast! My mom is doing the 3 dresses for Gaston’s silly girls, and I’m doing the Belle village dress and ballgown. Week before last, we went shopping… starting with a disappointing trip to Hancock Fabrics. 4 in the afternoon, lines four people deep at the cutting table and the register, bolts laying all over the dirty floor (store is not scheduling enough employees to keep the store clean and keep up with customers, seems like), and barely any decent fabric to choose from. That store is a mess. It’s no surprising the find out two days later they are filing for bankruptcy again. It breaks my heart because Hancock has ALWAYS been my preferred fabric store but they have just been going steadily downhill in the past decade. (step one: get rid of all of the home decor/as seen on tv/chotchkie crap crowding up the entire front section of the stores) step two: make sure all of the lights are on and working, they never are at any of our stores and it’s like going into a dreary cave. I’ll stop there, I could keep going… but it’s getting to be where it’s worth it to drive an extra 20 minutes to Joann because their store is neat, clean, well-lit and had a large variety.)
ANYWAY. I got off topic. We didn’t get a thing at Hancock, went to Joann the next day and got everything we needed. That weekend we were at Southern Fried, of course, so I didn’t start on anything until last week.
The blue dress
So my own, most recent of the blue dress is not what I would call theater friendly. It’s four pieces: the blouse, a lace-up bodice, a skirt and an apron. I knew I couldn’t repeat that for a stage show where the actress will need to change at one point, so I decided to make it all two pieces – a dress, and an apron.
I decided to use McCall’s M5954, with a couple of small changes. For the fabric, I found a lightweight blue crepe and a slightly patterned white cotton. The cotton ended up being a little too sheer, and I had to double it over for everything, but I had plenty so that wasn’t a problem!
I had a little problem with the sizing on this one.
My actress is a small in the bust and a medium in the waist. I cut the pattern out so that it edged into small towards the bust line and medium at the waist line. Easy fix, right? Nope, somehow I ended up with a “large” in both the bust and waist once I’d put the pieces together. I had to take it in quite a bit to get it down to her measurements. I sent it off for a fitting, and it came back still a little too big, but thankfully workable. Since the bodice is only 5 pieces (center front, two side front, and two back pieces), it didn’t leave me a lot of places to play around with taking it up, especially through the bust, so I had to basically turn the dart in the back into a full seam, so I could get rid of some of the width through the bust line.
But the bodice pieces went together easily and I was really happy that the pattern called for a full lining – I was able to use my lining pieces for the mock-up and then altered the outer pieces just like I did the lining.
For the skirt pieces I simply didn’t use the skirt extension pattern piece – the upper skirt section was just the right length for what I needed. The pattern pieces called for a VERY full skirt, and since I wanted to save fabric, I made them a little less wide – I think I eliminated about 3-4 inches on each pattern piece. I tried doing a machine gather as the pattern called for, but once I had it pinned on, I hated how it looked. I pulled it out and did a small running stitch by hand to gather it instead – it was much easier to deal with than the machine gather and looked neater.
For the sleeves, I used the pattern piece for the upper sleeve puff and just lengthened it by 8 inches. I gathered it at the top, but at the bottom I folded it over, threaded a white ribbon through it, and used that to gather it at the elbows. That way the actress can tighten it or loosen it however she likes.
Now I didn’t have a good shirt pattern to use for the white collar pieces. After looking through my patterns, I thought I would give the cowl neck pieces from Simplicity 4940 a try. I cut one out as a test – and it fit perfectly! Again I doubled the fabric over, flipped it, and then pinned it around my neckline and stitched it into place. The cowl neck pattern had a little excess length that I just cut away once it was sewn into place.
The apron I made just like every other one I’ve done for a Belle dress – a big rectangle, pleated, and stitched onto a waistband. I made a bow for the back, which will hide the velcro once I attach it. I also made a blue bow and stitched it onto a hair barrette.
All that’s left is hemming the skirt, putting the zipper in and the velcro on the skirt!
The ballgown
For the ballgown I decided to try Simplicity 1026 – the new live-action Cinderella based pattern. I thought this would be a really great base pattern for the Belle ballgown. Fabric-wise, I had to make-do with what I could find locally… what I could find locally with enough fabric on the bolt! I ended up on a really basic matte yellow satin for the bulk of it, and a thin gold netting for the overlays. I also grabbed some cheaper, shiny yellow satin just for the lining, and some plain yellow organza to back the shoulder piece in. The saddest thing was they had some beautiful gold embroidered organza that I would have LOVED to do the skirt gathers in, but there wasn’t near enough on the bolt. Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad š
But! I had some gold embroidered organza scraps in my stash leftover from my 2012 Belle. It certainly wasn’t enough for the skirt… but it was just enough to do a secondary layer on the bodice with!
Anyway. I used some more scraps out of my stash to put together a mock-up. This one needed much less fiddling with than the blue dress bodice – I had to take it up a bit on some of the back panels, but that was really it. Though – trying to get all of multiple bodice layers taken up the exact same amount has been a headache! All together there are five layers – two inner layers that will line it and hold the boning/bra cups in place, and one outer layer (my basic matte satin) covered it in two layers of sheers – the gold netting, and the embroidered organza. Here’s the outer pieces pinned together:
You can just baaaaaaarely see the gold netting in the photo, but it adds a whole lot of sparkle and dimension to the bodice that I really like.
That’s where I’m at with that one for now. I’m awaiting my hoopskirt to get started on the skirt pieces, but tonight I’m going to finish the inner layer of the bodice and get that sewn together, get the boning and bra cups in. Maybe I can get the outer layer on to… depends on how smoothly things go.