MAKING AN 1860s BALLGOWN | Cosplay showcase | Little Women

Hello everybody and welcome to the final part in making my 1860s ball gown inspired by Megs from Little Women. If you have not watched the first three parts I highly recommend that you do so and they will be linked in the description. This video will be of the grand reveal so let's jump straight in. Hello everybody and welcome back to the final installment of making my Meg gown. Now I will pick up right where we left off in the last video. I am sewing the skirt to the bodice. Now I decided to do this for organisation and storage and travel purposes. It is perfectly acceptable to make your bodice and your skirt separate pieces but this is how I'm doing it and I am simplifying it quite a lot but anyway. So as you will remember in our skirt tutorial I made a placket in my skirt with a snap here. Now there will be a bar or maybe another snap added here to properly close the skirt but I didn't add this so that I would be able to sew the skirt to the bodice. Now the bodice has a closure on it already and now I am sewing along the bottom hem of the bodice with the petersham of the skirt. So along this line that I already sewed here. Now don't worry about these raw edges, they will be overlocked. Now I am sewing the skirt to the end of the bodice here and leaving this placket bit unsewn, so open, to be able to close. Whereas on this side I'm sewing it right to the edge of the bodice and now I'm just going to do a running stitch around the whole thing and come back. So just a couple of finishing touches that I'm doing right now. I just hand sewed here these tiny little stitches on either side. I hand sewed the sash ribbon along the waist. I was going to do these stitches at the back but I think putting them here along the side seams allows me to pull in the ribbon a bit more on my waist. But I'll just keep it held there quite nicely. And the ribbon will tie in quite a nice bow at the back here, not this rushed job. But this ribbon is a really nice thick one that I had just laying around because I used it for a university project and then it became scrap that I wasn't going to use anymore so it's nice to add it into another project. And a tip for you all if you don't already know it, but to stop ribbon from fraying just hold it up to a flame or a candle or a candle lighter and just sort of melt the ends, not you know too close so it catches on fire, but just sort of hold it there and it'll kind of melt the fibres together and then you won't need to hem your ribbon. I think I need to go over it again just once more but I don't want to burn the edges, I'm always afraid of doing that. But yeah that's a little tip for you all if you didn't already know it. So this is how I will be hemming the skirt by folding over the top edge a couple of centimetres and pinning it down. I made sure to press along here, I was going to interface it but then later decided that it probably wasn't necessary. You can add a horsehair braid under here which I was going to do but also decided just not to. I'm not going to wear this dress too much where it has stress on the hem so I'd probably be better off without it. I'll include a clip now of me doing the process on my ironing board. I would recommend that you set some time aside to iron this all down and then get a good Netflix show to binge whilst you're hand sewing the hem down which is not fun and it's long and it takes a lot of time and I'm kind of dreading it but it is the last thing I need to do to finish this dress kind of. Give or take a few small tiny little things but it feels good to be at the end but also I hate leaving this to the end because it takes so long but I will be hand sewing this down with a whip stitch or herringbone stitch by hand and I will show you guys a little bit more information about that in a minute. You can also watch YouTube tutorials online for a whip stitch and a herringbone stitch, they're really useful hand stitch techniques so I would recommend you look them up and there are many great tutorials I've used. Maybe I'll link some in the description actually. I used these whip stitches as you can see here, they really don't pick up on camera and they're supposed to be kind of invisible on the other side like you can see just teeny tiny little stitches there so it's a really good hemming technique especially for a skirt like this. You wouldn't use a machine sewn hem on a historically accurate ball gown, I mean I don't think it looks nice anyway and I prefer to do this even though it takes ages and ages but like the back side looks so nice. If the fabric wasn't so kind of thin it would look better but there we go. And last but not least I added my personal little clothing tags which I love. I got them online and just added my name onto them but I add those onto every project that I do now so that's that and that completes my dress. Now I will say that I do want to add another very small trim along here but I'm trying to finish this up in a couple of days now and I am still looking for one that is really really small and fits the aesthetic of this dress and I've not had much luck yet so I'm still looking but that'll just be added when I find it and yeah I don't have anywhere to wear this dress but for now I don't think it looks too bad like I don't like the stitch lines here it does make it look a bit messy but they will be covered eventually so for now they will just have to look like that but other than that this thing is done. I've definitely learned a lot from making this that I can use in future projects that it's quite exciting I like that a project will give me that you know even though you make mistakes you learn and carry on but I have enjoyed it I think it's turned out quite pretty I mean maybe a little bit sickly and sweet but I think it's quite pretty the last thing I'm adding is these cute little pink gloves that I found on eBay now they are like polyester and super cheap but they're really cute I want us to bring gloves back into fashion because I mean they kind of are not because of you know situations but they're really cute and I don't have to touch anything with my hands which is so nice they're really really sweet and they match the dress perfectly all right so the final part of this costume and probably the ending of this video before the grand reveal is the wig now I know this wig looks a little bit busted but it is a really old wig but I'm just using a little meg because I was going to get rid of it otherwise and it has this really nice kind of grown out fringe look to it which works perfectly so I'm keeping it for these pictures but other than that you know I'm not going to use it again so I'm okay with using a cheap wig plus sometimes a cheap wig can look pretty nice but anyway I can't really style this wig into the big kind of 1860s up to that she has so I've just left this little bit here because she has this little curl that falls onto her shoulder and then I just have a little tiny bun at the back there like a ballerina bun this was from eBay and I got it to go with some of my 1940s outfits but it fits really nicely with this and then I used some of that sheer ribbon that I had left over to just add something extra to it I don't know where this wig was from but it was like 10 12 15 pounds I've had it for many years and like I said I was going to get rid of it so I'm not sure where it's from but it is a really thin wig which is quite nice actually in my opinion I don't like a really really thick wig and it fits this style and character a bit more so I'm quite excited to see how this full outfit looks one more thing just before I go and do the grand reveal I found these little earrings that I had that I'll be using and here is the finished gown I do really like how it turns out obviously in areas it is not perfect and it could use some more work but it was a fan make and it taught me a lot that I could use in the future and I don't think it looks half bad now I didn't include this in the videos but I have a crinoline and a petticoat underneath the skirt and here is some twirl action also excuse this backdrop we just used it to take some pictures for my instagram and portfolio of the dress we do not have a professional setup so it really isn't the best thing but it does the job thank you all so much for watching I hope you have enjoyed this video series and I would love to do something like this in the future so hit subscribe to see more content like this and I shall see you in my next video