Making the 1880s Skirt

I loved figuring out all the pleates on the underskirt as well as creating the waistband. Nether of which I had any problems with except how to attach them together as I had cartridge pleates at the back but box pleates the rest of the was round the skirt. In the end I hand stitched it all the way round to the bottom of the waistband. I have kept the stitching in some of the pleates still to hold them in place as well as pressing them and keeping them pinned for as long as possible, on a real dress I would probebly do very small swing catches between each pleate but I feel that I should get on with other parts of the project and come back to that later if I have time.

I know this was meant to be a finished garment however I didn't feel it would beinifit me at all by slip stiching the hem/doing the hem properly as I would spend a lot of time doing it and I did a lot of that sort of thing/finishes when I was on work experience so I just stitched a quick, rough hem which works enuogh for you to see how the dress would look and move however I didn't quite leave myself enough fabric at the hem so it is slightly short but not enough to really effect the look of the garment on the stand nor the cut of it.

Underlike the underskirt the skirt draping drove me crazy, everything that could go wronge with it went wronge with it. Firstly I would have liked to have used the pre-washed and pre-shrunk calico for the draping as it hangs and drapes better however the costume store ran out and it was going to be too expensive to buy the amount I needed so I used just plain, regular weight calico which worked prefectly well for getting an idea of what it will look like in thw end. Graham suggested I tried working with stripes in the drapeing which was very useful in the end however I had to draw the stripes onto calico myself and so they were not dead straight which meant later when I was tring to match them up it was much more difficult than if I had brought striped fabric. However after Candide I really couldn't afford to spend too much money on this project so calico had to do.

So I worked on the front draping first then...........................