Finally - My Peacock Dress!

Finally - My Peacock Dress!

I have lots of friends who sew, and those who just like to see what I make, so I have decided to write a bit of a "dress diary" of sorts, catching you all up on my adventures with pleating and safety pins from the last couple of days.

The first step in figuring out what I'm going to make - choosing the fabric. I got this green satin stuff from my sister-in-law, Ann, a few weeks ago (back in August, 2018). There is a TON of it - maybe 20 yards. I wanted to use it for something truly extravagant, to wear to #Faeriecon in November, but that's all I knew.
I started to dig through my stash of "shiny fabric", and found some blues, silvers and purples that "kinda" went with the green, but no other shades of green. I started to think something water-themed, but that really should be more blues than green, and it probably wasn't going to use up enough of the green satin in the end.

Then I found this lovely patterned stuff. I have had it around for YEARS. I don't even remember when or where I got it...but the greens match *exactly*!! I knew I had to do something with this combo...so I laid them out next to each other and started to brainstorm with the rest of my family. I really was attracted to the blue velvet with this combo right from the start, even though my husband said they "clash". After a little while, though, he was the one who came up with the final inspiration - the blue and green combo reminded us of a peacock. I've been wanting to do a peacock-themed dress for years, and I immediately jumped on that idea!

The next hardest part is figuring out a style. If you haven't learned this about me yet, I sew "out of my own head". I haven't followed a commercial pattern in probably 10 years or more. I may take pieces out of a pattern I have lying around, just to get the proportions or a basic shape of a piece, but usually that's it. I make everything else up in my sketchbook with my own measurements, mock-ups and math.
The inspiration for this dress started with a Google search of "Peacock inspired dress images", which led me to a bunch of masquerade and Quinceanera gowns, the main theme of which is a "pick-up style" of skirt. (If you want to know - ask me how hard it was to figure out what THAT was *called*. It's tough to ask Google "What is this skirt style called?" when all you have is a picture...).

Inspiration 1

Inspiration 2

Inspiration 3

More Google searches for tutorials, some quick sketches, and some math, and I had A Plan.

The first step of the plan was to make a base skirt layer that fit over top of my hoop skirt.

Hoop Skirt on the mannequin

I dug through my stash for something light but strong, and used the drape method to make this underskirt. That one sentence does not convey the number of curse words and days that it took. Trust me, there were PLENTY of both. Especially as I discovered - too late - that my base layer fabric had a big flaw running through part of it (see picture). I did not have enough fabric to replace that piece, and did not have enough interest in throwing it all out to start again, so, I put it aside for a couple of days to let my thought process percolate.

Flaw in the under-layer fabric

While figuring out my base layer problem, I started to work on the top layer of the dress. This is where the math comes in. My hoop skirt is 130" in circumference at the bottom, and is 44" from waist to hem. According to my research, the top layer needed to be at least 1.5 times that wide, and twice as long. My fabric is 45" wide, so I cut 5 pieces that were 90 inches long and sewed them selvage to selvage to make a rectangle over 200 inches wide by 90 inches long. One of the pieces is the patterned fabric. I then made a waistband out of the green fabric that fits my waist, and sewed gathering stitches into one loooonnnngggg edge of the skirt, and I gathered over 200 inches of fabric into a 29 inch band. It was MOSTLY successful. I then sewed the inner base layer skirt to the same waistband, and top-stitched the whole thing three times to make sure it isn't going to come undone! (I'm still worried it might...)

As I said on Facebook "And for my next trick, I will attempt to gather 200+ inches of the shreddiest fabric into a 29 inch waistband."

Finally I fit the whole mess over my dress dummy (ok, she's a mannequin, but her waist size and mine are identical), and cheered that it fit!

So finally, I was ready to sew the pick-up skirt. I figured I would put strips of cotton between the pick-ups and the base layer, to add some stability and hopefully work around the big flaw that way. My theory here is still to be proven out, but the whole day today was spent acquiring safety pins so I could make about 150 pin-tucks in the skirt. The first picture is my trial run with straight pins.

I didn't like how big the flounces were and decided to go for a smaller pattern.

I realized soon that "pattern" was not really going to happen, and so I went for "beautiful chaos" as the over-all goal. These pictures are taken before I went back and fixed a few spots that were bugging me, cut the hem, and took the whole thing off the mannequin.

I then left it lying inside-out on my sewing table, ready for the tucks to be permanently stitched down. I was mentally daunted by that task, so I took a break for a while, and posted all this (up to this point) on Facebook.

After a few days, I started to hand-stitch all the tucks of the upper layer of fabric to the under layer.

It took about 2 weeks of stitching just a few tucks every day to finish sewing them all down by hand. I did eventually give up on trying to use the cotton strips for stability in every one. I used it where I could reach, but otherwise, it was just too much effort to try to keep the tuck in place, hold on to it with one hand while sewing with the other, and keeping everything from getting tangled. I instead cut small squares of cotton, and used those for a bit of extra strength. You can see them in the picture below.
Then I put the skirt back on the mannequin, marked the hem, and pinned it all down with about 180 straight pins.

On September 8th, I was able to work on the bodice of my #peacockdress. Again, I don't usually work from commercial patterns but I did snag a couple of pieces from one for this. I have never made myself a dress with "Angel sleeves" before, so I decided to use an old McCall's pattern for inspiration. I made the mock-up and fit it to myself, then adjusted the neckline and the princess seams for where I wanted them to be. I also smoothed out the point of the bodice to be more rounded because it needs to not stick down over the fluffy bits of my skirt. 😜
I had to play with the shoulder seams a lot, as usual, because I have weirdly sloping shoulders that no regular pattern accounts for. After I got everything fit the way I wanted it, I cut out the gorgeous blue velvet fashion fabric and the lining. I am reminded why I hate sewing with velvet... The stuff slides around under the sewing machine presser foot and never ends up as nicely lined up as the mock-up.

Anyway... I had to pause to go buy grommets and ribbon, so I didn't make any more progress for a couple of days. Once I had the final bits, I spent a day or two putting in the grommets along the back of the bodice, and in the shoulders and sleeves so they could be detached as desired. I absolutely fell in LOVE with the new grommets I found, and I need to go back and look up what they were called so I can make a note and remind myself the next time I need more. They were *so* easy to install, and worked like a dream.
I put hooks and eyes on the skirt and the bodice to hold them together while wearing it all, and then did a trial fitting. My eldest daughter, NJ, took a couple of pictures for me so I could see what it all looked like on.