Weiss: Petticoat done! First pictures.

Hey guys

After some weeks worth of work I have made the basic dress. Colour and embroidery will be added later. Blog post about the dress is in progress and will be out next week. 

The petticoat is completely finished and I here give you the walkthrough of how I did it for those who are interested. 

From now on the blog will have all the progress whereas my facebook page (Yeah, I have a facebook page now. Wuuhuu) will have the finished piece and perhaps a few progress pictures. 

As for the petticoat, here goes: 

To make Weiss’ dress as big as necessary I needed a petticoat underneath. I decided to make the petticoat myself as I welcomed the challenge and my last underskirt was a bit of a failure. The shape of the dress changes, but overall it has a clean A-shape. I decided on a one-layer petticoat, with three sections, each 10 cm wide.

Ruffling a 12 m piece of fabric.
Can you tell this is my first petticoat? 

Traditionally each section is ruffled to fit the next. I started by ruffling one of the long layers (12 m). As you can see on the picture this is somewhat uneven and it was quite an overwhelming experience to try and make it even. I decided that I do not like this look and thus changed it on the other sections.

Instead of ruffling I decided to pleat the layers. To reduce the strips to half the length I used my wonderclips as spacing, pleating every other (see picture). 

Pleating. Lots of pleating.

This is not the traditional look but as the petticoat is hidden anyway I really do not mind as this makes it even and less time consuming in my opinion. When the 12 m strips were pleated they were sown on to the 6 m strips which were then pleated to fit the 3 m strips.

The 3 m strips are to be sown directly onto the lining and thus they must fit it.

The lining:

The lining is a simple circle skirt cut out of 1 piece of fabric therefore it doesn’t have seams. Since the fabric is non-stretchy I made the lining 105 cm so it’ll go over my butt. It will get an elastic waistband so it fits my waist. I hemmed the bottom of the lining and attached the layer of tulle at the top. Hereafter I made a waistband by folding over the fabric and sewed 3 channels for the elastic, leaving every other empty.

Channels for elastic. Every other will be empty.

Sewing with the elastic inside
the channel.

I decided to sew the channels with the elastic in them with a zipper foot attached to my machine. This was to avoid pulling the elastic through with a safety pin as it has a hard time gliding on the cotton. The waistband was sewn onto the lining and the last step was covering all the seams with ribbon.

Ribbon getting sewn onto the seams.

I will need to shorten both the dress and the lining of the petticoat, but as I'm going to a needle work expo next weekend I will wait and see if I find a rolled hem foot for my machine.
Here you can see the finished Petticoat (picture also on facebook) and how much it changes the dress when worn underneath.

With the dress and petticoat done this leaves almost no sewing left of the costume. I need to sew half of the seams of the jacket before dying, but as I will buy the dye in February I'm not really stressing about it. My facebook page has finished pictures and also pictures of the skirt with the petticoat underneath.

So until next time! Cya

- Miliyia

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