I Made an Edwardian Summer Dress (Part 2)

Hello! Welcome to part two of this modernized Edwardian lingerie dress project. In this video, I will be working on the skirt portion of the dress. In my last video, I worked on the top. That video will be linked up here if you want to go check that out. And yeah, let's get started. So, I went about patterning this a little bit differently than I've seen anyone else pattern things. I drafted a front panel off of my measurements and made that and did the insertion lace and then I went back and patterned the rest of the skirt. This is quite unusual, but that's that's how it happened. I went back and I created the pattern for the rest of the top portion of my skirt. So, this was based off of measurements and I added extra room in the back to be pleated down because I did want that slight bit of extra fullness. So, to do the insertion lace at the edge of the front panels, I first sewed those seams by machine and then I pressed them open to make sure that there would be no extra fabric hiding anywhere and then I basted my lace down by hand. Then I went in with some silk thread and a backstitch and backstitched the edge of those pieces of lace. Then I cut the fabric, cut the seam behind the lace, pressed it open and then folded that little edge under and did a running stitch there through the edge of the fabric and I think this one didn't actually go through the edge of the lace. The rest of the skirt seams in the top portion of the skirt are just sewn by machine normally. Then I did a small sort of hem at the bottom of this part of the skirt. I only folded the up once though. Then I took the next piece of lace and sewed it around the entire bottom edge of this top portion of the skirt. So, for the bottom part of the skirt, I debated whether to do a flounce or a ruffle. A flounce being a ruffle that's cut on a curve so that the inside part doesn't need to be gathered for you to get that ruffling effect at the edge. You can gather a flounce to have it even more ruffly but the idea of a flounce is that you get the ruffle by having something cut on the curve. So, I decided against doing a flounce. I decided to do just a straight ruffle because I wanted to do some lace insertion and pin tucks there and doing lace insertion and pin tucks on a curve sounded very unappealing. So, yeah. So, I cut out some strips. I think they were about 12 inches long and then I sewed them into a very long strip and created one pin tuck, one row of lace insertion, and I added some lace edging to the bottom. For this lace insertion, because it was so long, I just sewed the edge by machine from the right side and then cut the fabric, pressed it open, and then sewed that edge by machine again. That was it because I was not about to do three yards of lace insertion by hand. Yeah. So, then once I had the ruffle, I sewed it into a tube and me not measuring. My lace insertion didn't exactly match up but we're gonna pretend that it did and then I gathered the top of the ruffle. Now, I do generally prefer hand gathers whenever possible. I think they look nicer and they're and I could explain that. Maybe in another video I will but this was long so I gathered this by machine. So, to gather this by machine, first I marked the four quadrants of the ruffle which is now in a tube. So, I marked four equal points and I also marked four equal points on my skirt and then to gather it, I sewed a gathering stitch only between each two points because I thought if I did one thread around the entire thing, that would be a disaster and the thread might break and moving gathers for six feet is, you know, not very much fun. So, I thought I would do sections that were only about three feet, four feet, or something and then it would be easier to keep track of what my gathers were doing and to not break the gathering threads. So, I gathered by machine and then I pinned the quarter points to the quarter points on my upper skirt and then I pulled and gathered the ruffle to fit the skirt. Then, I sewed the ruffle on by machine. I decided to do it right sides together with the skirt which is kind of the opposite of what I had been doing with all of the insertion lace because usually with insertion lace you have your fabric and you just you just slap the lace on top and sew it and then cut the fabric underneath. I wasn't thinking so I sewed the ruffle and the skirt right sides together. For the waistband, I did just a plain waistband cut the same direction as the selvage on green and then I just did a double fold waistband. I pleated the back relatively imprecisely and pinned it onto the waistband, sewed it right sides together, and then I folded my waistband back, pressed the edges under, and hand sewed the inside of the waistband all together. The last thing was to sew on some little hooks and eyes at the back and that was it! So yeah, this is... I'm still... I'm pretty new to this whole concept to completion of a whole outfit thing. I only really started doing it in the last year, so I'm pretty... I'm pretty proud of this one. I feel like it does capture what my initial sketch and idea was, which is always wonderful. And yeah, I now have a two-piece, very Edwardian summer dress set. It's a little... it's a little heavyweight for like hot, hot summer, but it does pretty well in like warm weather. So warm, not hot. There's a difference. Uh, post-production me, I actually shot the reveal for this video in mid-80s, I think, weather, which I would consider hot, and I was quite comfortable. So this is actually pretty functional for quite, quite warm weather. Anyways, back to other me. But yeah, I am excited to wear both of these pieces separately. I feel like they can work. They can work with other things in my wardrobe. I would like to say that I should probably make a nice tea-length, delicate Edwardian petticoat. That would be pretty great, but I have not yet. So I'm just wearing my, uh, my late Victorian slash Edwardian, uh, circular drawers with these. I love those, and I wear them under all of my skirts. They're great, and they add a little bit of floof and, and laciness, but without all of the, all of the floof that comes along with a skirt. So yeah, um, thanks for watching. If you like this video, like it. If you didn't like it, I guess dislike it. I always, I always find it cool when people say to do that, because they're like actually asking for feedback, even though I'm kind of scared. But if you don't like this video, dislike it or leave a comment below explaining why. Um, and yeah, I will see you again if you choose to come back. Bye!