Hiding the dress away for a while

A small pic to show some progress. I've sewn almost all the lace motifs onto the bottom layer and rethought my skirt design slightly. 

On the bottom layer - small 'spikes' of motifs will run up each seam and the centre back seam will have a lot more lace 'cascading down' the full length of the skirt and train.

For the two voile layers - the only lace will be at the centre back and some along the very bottom. The motifs will be scattered around the layers to give a little more depth.

I've done all the seams apart from two (leaving open for better fitting) and all the 'spikes' of lace motifs on the seams bar 2, plus the two seams that aren't yet sewn. The dress now has to go away as my fiancé has returned home.

After positioning and laying out all the layers nicely I've positioned a pink fabric at the bottom. I've told my fiancé that my dress is a pale pink colour which would really not suit my skin tone. He believes me so I'm continuing the pretence. Theres obviously nothing wrong with pink wedding dresses but it is not 'us'!

Heres the dress with the big parachute like cover so he can't see anything (apart from a tiny bit of pink poking out the bottom)!

Underskirt Part 3

For attaching the hoops I made four 'sleeves' for them - here they are before being turned inside out.

...And after flipping and ironing. NB My jubilee nails!

I threaded the hoops through the sleeves and rejoined the circles with the plastic sleeves that were used with the original underskirt.

I pinned and sewed my hoops in the wrong place and had to reposition them. The lilac shows where I repositioned them to. You should have the skirt wrong way out before positioning and sewing. Where you have the hoops and at what angle will dictate the shape of the dress. I wanted mine reasonably Teardrop A-Line shaped but with the train trailing further out. If you want to be more A-Line without a train position the hoops horizontally. For Princess you position the smaller loop higher up! After positioning its worth flipping the skirt right side out to see where the hoop holds the fabric away from the body.

Next I ironed all the netting which took ages!

And made sure that the gathers were either still in place or regathered and sewn.

There are three layers of netting - one at the top which is only around the back half of the dress.

And two more further down that go all the way around. They are more gathered at the back for volume where you want it. 

I ended up repositioning my bottom two netting layers further down and in more of a 'V' so that the bottom layer is almost horizontal and laying on the floor - I'm hoping this will help the train stay out and looking good.

I found sewing the netting onto the skirt was easiest by hand - the stitches aren't exactly tiny and neat but I don't think it'll look any tidier by machine! I'm considering sewing lace edging to the bottom layer of net so that any bits that peek out from underneath the dress will still look nice!

Underskirt Part 2

Heres where we left off:

Next I made a yoke pattern straight from the dressmaker.

 Here it is after cutting and sewing together two layers. The top curve needed to be notched.

After flipping right side out, ironing flat and pinning to the dressmaker.

Lots of fiddling later, the yoke was sufficiently pinned to the skirt and sewn together.

Here I've added two ribbons to tie the skirt closed. I may add more ribbons later to close the slight 'gape'. Next up will be hoops and netting!