WIP American Girl Victorian Dress

After having been laptop-less for quite awhile, its nice to be able to blog again! This post's subject is the WIP Victorian I started some weeks ago. Between my ribbon conundrum and life happening, its just been sitting there for weeks.

This is my inspiration pic.

The salmon color is quite hideous. I didn't want to make an exact copy, so I went through my fabric hoard to pick out what I thought would be a good fit both for the pattern and also for the intended doll, which happened to be my beautiful Nicki I got as a gift on Halloween. I went with a floral pattern on white. Since white lace would just be lost on the white fabric, I decided to go with a pink ribbon and do some sort of fancy ribbon work for the trim. Ribbon work isn't something I really do, so I had to decide exactly how I wanted the trim to look, and then find a good tutorial that explained how to accomplish it.

First I went with a darker pink - not dark dark, but more I guess of a medium rose pink - ribbon an inch wide. I really had a hard time trying to find any decent tutorials searching on my phone. Now on a laptop, I can find quite a few of them! What I originally tried to do did not work. Not only was I not pleased with the affect of my sad attempt at a fancy trim, I wasn't really liking the pink color of the ribbon. So, back to the store I went and got this time a paler 1/2 pink. The simplest thing to do, I decided next, was to simply pleat the ribbon. I love the affect combined with the fabric of the dress. :D

So far I have the ribbon on one cuff and the bodice. I started adding it last night to one of the top curved collar  pieces that surround the pin tucked yoke. Its a bit of a challenge to neatly curve it while keeping the pleats steady. I have a feeling that I am doing this the hard way. There's probably a technique to this that I am not using. I'll have to do more research to see what I can learn on the proper way of doing ribbon work. Here's all the pieces I have left to trim:

I went ahead and sewed the pin tucked yoke to the bodice piece before I actually needed to, but I wanted to see how it looked. I will take it back off, and add the other pieces to it, then sew it all back together.

In a true confession, I think I rushed the drafting/testing process with this dress. I'm seeing a couple of issues where I didn't think it through as carefully as I should have, where I should have been more cognizant of bulk, etc. Hopefully though, everything will go together neatly, and I'll be happy with the finished process. If it all comes together right, my Nicki is going to look absolutely gorgeous in it!