Cristal's Elevation Dress

My friend Cristal was offered to become a member of the Order of the Laurel for Period Cooking a while ago.

Being me, I offered to make her dress. She chose an illumination from the Romance of Alexander, the blue dress to the right of the picture.

So we planned a weekday trip to the LA Garment District. It turned out that the forecast was rain, and I mean rain.  We went anyway and luckily for us, we found 3 patterned fabrics that she fell in love with: all in the same store!  Getting samples cut from the fabric guy, we wandered around for a while and dreamed and then settled on a medium blue with a dark blue and white swirly design. I don't think we could have found anything more perfect.  Then we found blue velvet for the faux sleeves and short white faux fur for the sleeves.

The next week, we got together at my house and began the task of cutting
out the dress from a pattern that she liked. (I liked it so much, that I copied
the sleeve pattern to use on another friends dress!)  She wanted a gore at
each of the 4 seams of the cotehardie.

I'm a pretty quick seamstress and I had the basic dress finished. The front
looked funny though. We'd done a gore in the front and it just didn't look
right. It made the dress hang funny both on the mannequin and from a
hanger so I removed it after a consultation. The picture to the right
is the before version.

Then I tackled the sleeves. Learning from my last dress, I cut the fur from the backside after tracing the pattern on it. For the top half of the lining, I used a very fine linen.  The idea of the sleeves is that a little of the turn shows on the outside. It was a bit of a challenge but I got it done. The fur wanted to roll under the fashion fabric so I tacked it down a little using invisible stitches.

After attaching the sleeves to the dress, I tackled the fore sleeves. Cristal wanted a curved sleeve to cut down on bunching in the elbow's. I love the idea!  It took me several attempts and about 3 yards of scrap fabric, but I got it figured out. I've never sewn on such fine and delicate fabric and after we got the pewter buttons and I sewed them in place up the arm, they look fabulous.

The day came at last, the day before her elevation she got to try it all on.  It fit really nice, the sleeves were a bit snug on her arms with the faux under sleeves on. We hadn't taken that in to consideration.

The only thing I'd do different, make the sleeves a little wider (which we plan on) and to wash the fabric before hand.  I always wash my fabric but because she wants to dry clean the dress, we didn't. I think it would have been much softer to work with and the smell would have gone away.