Cecile's dress - its a handful. I'm titling this blog post 'a tale of rick rack' but maybe I should title it 'a tale of pointy tips and how to get them to hang right.' This dress was honestly, the trickiest AG dress I can remember to date working out a pattern for. The bodice itself is easy, and the skirt is straigh forward. It's the peplum and the sleeves that led to those "AGH!" moments.
You can see on the illustration how Cecile's hand covers the front of the peplum, so I tried to fill in the blanks as well as I could, mimicking the sleeves form. You can also see how there is no break in the rick rack trim going from bodice to peplum. It is an illustration, yes, and those things can be tinkered with to make the sewing actually work, but in this instance it did need to be done as shown here due to the difficulty it would cause to try and line it up perfectly after cutting the rick rack into 2, not to mention creating unnecessary bulk.
The peplum was a fun challenge, getting the shape right and also getting the hang right. I wasn't sure if it needed a light gather, but pretty quickly decided that would look very wrong. The sleeves I had to re-do more than once as my first attempts were gathered just enough to make them look a little bit like bird wings. Lol. That didn't work. So, I took out some of the gather, shortened the layers a little as well. That worked really well.
My beautiful Luna is modeling the pictures of my dress here. I wish I had taken the time to get good pics of it, but as soon as I finished the dress I wanted to get it out to the PO immediately. I will make another one for my own dolls to fight over. (Luna has decided she needs to wear 1850's dresses, Henrietta is screaming it should be hers, and I will at one point be getting a MG in a trade, which neither girl presently realizes. :P)
