At long last, after seeking fabric and notions all over the state and the internet, I have spent the last two days working in earnest on a beautiful dress for Nora to wear as she plays the role of flower girl for her uncle’s wedding in a few weeks.

I’m using the Pascal/Alice Blue Gown pattern from Sew Beautiful (second cover down on that page), but without the smocking. It was my intention to smock the bodice, but then I realized what a pain hand-pleating the fabric really is and decided to embroider it instead.

The fabric is silk dupioni, in a sage green color. It looks alternately gray or gold depending on the light and presence of a flash, but outside in the sunshine is definitely green.

Here’s the bodice marked up with tailor tacks for embroidering:

And two perfectly piped sleeves that I finished today with the help of a Threads magazine article on how to get your piping to stay flat (lots of hand basting, but worth it!):

And here is the back of the gown, folded in half — the amount of skirt you can see is only a quarter of the fullness. You can vaguely see a picture of the back of the original dress in the magazine on the table.

There will be embroidery on the back bodice as well. More on that process as it progresses this week.

The goal is to get it done to the point of handwork finishing this week, as we’ll be spending next week with my parents for some much-needed rest and relaxation.

This entry was posted by Jess on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Fabric, In Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.