Monday, March 24, 2014

Old blanket + prom dress = LoTR inspired?

Hello all!  I attempted to make posts as I went along with this one, but the technology was arguing with me so I gave up.  And I made this one pretty quickly - three or four days (some are just evenings) over the course of about two weeks.

I'm helping my mom and dad move, and we had an old velvet blanket that my mom was using to cover a wall.  It had lots of holes in it from being made to fit the wall, and one burn spot.

I also found my prom dress from junior year.  And I had a pattern sitting around for a LoTR style dress.  Sooooooo . . . . that's what I decided to do.  Because clearly, that's what you do with velvet, satin, and organza.

The first step was prepping the fabric.  I had to puzzle out how to fit the dress pieces on the velvet, and I had to make the skirt and sleeves less full.  I also had to separate the skirt of the prom dress from the bodice, and then separate the organza from the satin.

Once I had the skirts separated, I took a panel out of the satin and sewed it back up.  I used part of the organza for the lining of the sleeves.

After that, it was a matter of following the pattern (except I altered it to make the center panel disappear since I was doing an underskirt instead.  It's way more accurate to both the LoTR movie dresses and the historical periods those dresses are based on).

Here's the finished product!  The underskirt is to the right - it tends to static cling to my dress dummy.  It's a lot fuller than it looks here.

The back turned out pretty well - I had some sewing issues with the panels for the eyelets, but it's not too bad.

 The sleeves are one of my favorite things about the dress.  You have a pointy bottom (always a favorite from childhood cartoons and historical periods) AND you get the flowing over-sleeve.  It's ridiculously fun.



The only items I bought to make this dress was the trim (on sale at Hancock Fabrics, and somehow I magically guessed the exact right amount to get - the pattern doesn't account for trim along the front like I have, because it doesn't do an underskirt - the color in the front is just a panel of the actual skirt. Yuck) and the gold lacing for the back, and a bit of interfacing since I couldn't find mine.  Overall, not too shabby!

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