The belle of the ball

The Reader has recently finished her secondary schooling. For many schools in Australia, it is customary to celebrate this achievement with a “formal”. This is usually a formal dinner/dance probably much like a prom in America. At some schools, parents also attend, but at my daughter’s school and the one I attended, it is for Year 12 students and their partners (if they wish to bring one), and school staff. The Reader’s formal was on Tuesday night, but we had begun the planning for her dress at the beginning of the year.

We can’t completely remember how the idea for the style of the dress came about. She liked the idea of a dress that was almost empire line. We spent a bit of time looking at formal dress websites, and found one design that we thought we could use as a basis for the dress. If you take a look at the dress in the link, you can see that the bodice appears to be embroidered and possibly beaded.

Since the needlework cruise that I did some years ago to Singapore, I had been toying with the idea of a dress or cushion or something with peacock feather motifs. I had bought beads and sequins in Singapore with this colour scheme and idea in mind. I must have mentioned this idea to The Reader, because she enthusiastically embraced the idea of it for her bodice.

In February, we purchased the fabric from Sogo Fabrics in Cabramatta. The staff there are always so helpful. She bought teal chiffon and satin charmeuse, and a lighter, brighter green satin charmeuse as well.

Because The Reader and I did a pattern drafting course together some years ago, we have the skills to draft our own patterns. I drafted a bodice, made a toile and tried it on her. (Unfortunately she is way too petite to be able to find or use a dressmaker’s dummy – none with a womanly figure are small enough). It went through three revisions, until I was happy with the fit.

I thought for some months about how I was going to create the peacock feather bodice. I considered creating machine made lace feather motifs. I still think I’d like to try this idea. I had the exquisite creations of Meredith Woolnough in mind. However, in the end I went back to what I know: embroidery and beading.

I bought a plain canvas from one of the local cheap shops and removed the canvas so that I could use the frame for embroidering the bodice front panel. I stretched teal satin over it, and then the chiffon. I then realised that really I needed another base fabric, so while it would have been sensible to put this on the frame first, I attached a layer of plain white cotton onto the back. I traced, then tacked the bodice pattern onto the fabric. I remember tacking around it in the car, while waiting for The Gymnast at a gymnastics training session.

I went through my stash of satins and silks and found the blues and greens I’d been collecting for my nebulous peacock feather “something” for some time. I appliqued the centre shapes of the feather motifs onto the fabric. Then I added the beading. After that, I embroidered feathery, frondy bits in metallic green threads.

Adding some beads

Finishing off a thread on the back

I really enjoyed this part, seeing it take shape. The embroidery process took several months, mostly because I worked on it during the July school holidays, and then set it aside until the next school holidays.

Once the embroidered bodice was finished, I drafted and made a ruched “sash” section to sit just beneath it. This was made from the teal satin.

After this, I drafted the skirt. The plan was to have a full circle skirt for the overskirt, of chiffon, with pleats at the seams of each of the 8 sections of skirt. Adding a 1cm pleat at the waist added about 25cm of circumference at the bottom of the skirt! We’d bought 10 metres of chiffon for all this, but only 3 metres of the lighter green satin charmeuse for the underskirt, as we planned for the underskirt to be a lot less full. It ended up being a half circle skirt, made from four sections.

I thought long and hard about the pleats. In the end, while I keep the fullness I’d added to the pattern to account for them, I realised that it was going to be difficult to make them sit well and look right, seeing the chiffon is see-through. So I decided to dispense with the pleats and just ease the fullness in with some very light gathers at the waist.

Cutting out about 10 metres worth of chiffon into eight skirt sections was not something I was looking forward to. I read up about it, and decided that the best way to do it would be to sandwich the fabric between two light layers of paper. I bought some rolls of paper for this purpose from a local fabric shop. I laid one on the floor, then laid the chiffon over it. I pinned it straight across the end of the paper, and also parallel to each side. I laid the second layer of paper over the top and pinned the two paper layers together. I was trying to pin through the chiffon as little as possible. I then traced the pattern piece onto the top layer of paper and laid some heavy books over it to keep it all in place.

The pattern piece in place on top of the sandwiched layers. Held in place by weights (they’re pewter chess pieces!)

Cutting the sandwiched layers makes it so much easier

The paper sandwich means that particularly when you’re cutting on the bias, the fabric doesn’t stretch and move. It keeps it all nicely straight and means that you can cut the pattern piece out wonderfully accurately. I loved this method!

I did this for the remaining pattern pieces. If I make it sound like a quick process, I don’t mean to mislead. It took me about a day and a half to get all this done! I then cut out the 4 skirt pieces from the charmeuse.

I used normal seams with zigzagged edges (I don’t have an overlocker/serger) for the underskirt, but french seams for the chiffon overskirt. This made it very neat. I left space at the top of the back seam for the zip. I ran two lines of gathering threads around the top of the overskirt, and tacked it to the top of the underskirt. Then these were attached to the bottom of the sash section.

I pondered the zip for a couple of days. I couldn’t figure out how to insert the zip, but then have the two skirt layers floating separately from each other below the zip part of the seam. With a bit of help from Google, I realised that if I inserted the invisible zip in only the underskirt, I could then hand finish the edges of the chiffon zip section, and hand sew them down each side of the zip. This worked well. It’s probably not the way a professional would do it, but it worked fine for me!

Before hemming – a little uneven!

The hem. The overskirt had about 11 metres of hem. 11 metres. The underskirt had considerably less! Because the overskirt was made of chiffon which is such a flimsy, moveable fabric, advice said to let it hang for a week before hemming. I didn’t have a week! I only had about 4-5 days, and that included the time I would need for the hemming. So I let it hang as long as I could. With the advice of a colleague, I had decided that hand-hemming the skirt was going to give me the best result.

Marking the hem with the chalk squirter

When I was at the local fabric shop getting a couple of supplies, I saw that they had what I am calling a “chalk squirting hem marker thingy”. The idea is that it stands on the floor, with the “marker” set at the hem height. With the help of a little puffer it squirts a line of chalk onto the fabric, marking the hem. I decided that this would probably help me. And help me it did. Instead of making The Reader stand there in her dress for HOURS and HOURS while I pinned it, I was able to mark the chiffon overskirt’s hem in about half an hour. Hurrah! It was much, much quicker, much easier, and more accurate.

I then set about hemming. I used the method shown in this video. I particularly like that the instructor is left-handed. 😉

The chiffon hem took me one and a half days to complete. Then we did the same thing again for the underskirt hem. Something to keep in mind if you do this sort of thing is that the charmeuse stretches less than the chiffon, which means that when I cut off the extra length (and weight) of the uneven bit at the bottom, the chiffon skirt sprang up much higher than the charmeuse did subsequently. Fortunately I anticipated this, and therefore set the hem height higher for the charmeuse. This way, they ended up about even.

I am happy to say that I finished the dress with 48 hours to spare before the formal! Yay! I used the remaining time to make a small matching clutch for The Reader to carry.

The Reader looking gorgeous in her peacock dress

The all-important twirling photo. With all that skirt, it’s the perfect dress for twirling! You can see the lighter green underskirt.

An emerald peacock feather

A blue peacock feather

The embroidered and beaded bodice

I also made a small bag to match. We called it a glorified pencil case

I think we can call this my dressmaking magnum opus for 2017. While I did make my own formal dresses for Year 10 and Year 12, they were nowhere near as big a deal as this dress, particularly because I drafted this one as well as sewing it. I really enjoyed the challenge of making this dress, and The Reader simply loved wearing it.

Thanks go to Bel of CIAM Australia for teaching me pattern drafting, and to Michelle for advice on the hemming. And thanks to The Reader for allowing me the privilege of making such a lovely dress.