The Unbelievably Orange Dress

5-15-02

Yes, you read that right. An orange dress. I think it's my subconscious intention to imitate an orange traffic cone or something... It all started several months ago with the aquisition of some fabulously orange silk/wool. Alas, I was only able to rescue about a yard and a half of it from the 50% off table of my favorite fabric store, but I instantly knew that it was destined to become an Elizabethan doublet. The silk/wool languished for a while in the back of my fabric stash until it was joined by a very orange sari I bought on Ebay about a month ago. The sari was purchased with another purpose in mind (a side project of mine right now is researching 16th century Mughal clothing in India) but today, while sitting at work, I was struck by the brilliant idea to combine the two fabrics into one gloriously orange outfit. An outfit so orange that people will probably wonder, nay, marvel at the magnificence that is moi. Or something like that.

Anyhoo, in my work-addled brain, I had convinced myself that the two shades of orange in the silk/wool and the sari were nearly identitical. A quick look once I got home proved otherwise.

On the left hand side of the picture is the silk/wool which can only be described as a "shimmery cheeto" kind of color, or perhaps "shiny Kraft Macaroni & Cheese™" orange. I love it. :) The right side of the photo shows the sari, which is a deep tomato orange with horozontal gold zari stripes woven into the fabric throughout. At a distance, the zari work makes the whole color shift towards a lovely shade of pinkish-orange. I had a few misgivings about combining the two colors, fearful that it would be too much eye-popping color in one outfit for even the most hardened orange fanatics out there. But a quick poll with my partners-in-crime, Jen & Melissa, and my worries were put to rest. I was going to go for it!

This pic shows the silk/wool and the sari together in broad daylight. The contrast isn't so bad once you adjust yourself to the fact that it's all *very orange*. In a rather unsubtle way. The majority of the sari will become the skirt, which will be lined with another one of my fabrics from the Not-Terribly-Subtle stash: A rather shocking shade of goldenrod linen.

In this picture you can see the pallav, or the fancy bit at the end of the sari. This is the portion that is typically draped over the shoulder in the nivi style wrap (otherwise known as the most common style of draping a sari). It was my original intention to use the pallav piece to make a choli for the Mughal outfit and use the rest of the sari for a skirt, but having forgone on that idea, I decided to use the pallav to line the doublet. I was originally thinking about making sleeves from this portion of the sari, but I was having issues with the fact that the zari work is in an obvious paisley pattern. Paisley is fine for Indians during this period, but probably not for Elizabethans. Besides, the gold embroidery on the inside of the doublet would just look cool against the silk/wool.

Here's the picture I doodled in Photoshop using cut and pasted parts of the images above to "color in" the sketch. It gives a nice idea of how the entire outfit will probably look in the end. One of the best things about this outfit will be the reaction it will get when another one of my online costume buddies (or should I say "bunnies"?) Teddy gets a look at it for the first time. Teddy is well known for his orange fixation and maybe it is his subtle Jedi powers that have made me want to make this outfit... Maybe, one day, if I ever manage to cross the Atlantic, I will appear unnanounced on his doorstep in this outfit. And we will all laugh madly at the rest of the world! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Er. Sorry. It's late and I ceased to pay attention to what I was writing about 20 minutes ago...

5-18-02

Much of the patterning and fitting was finished 2 days ago, but I've been unable to update the diary so it had to wait. This part is mostly boring. It's all about fitting, pinning, refitting, repinning, re-refitting... You get the idea.

The doublet pattern. This was actually modified from an earlier pattern I had drafted a few months back for a different doublet. That pattern resembled this one except that I had made the collar seperate. The pattern above took yet another modification in that I added curved seams over the bust to better control the fit of the doublet.

*

The series of pictures above shows the silk/wool has been cut out using the aforementioned pattern and is being fitted to the dummy to make sure it still fits. Patterns have an odd habbit of changing on you from the initial toile to the real thing without warning. In this case, the pattern worked!

*

This series of pictures shows the shell has now been assembled, along with the collar. All the seams are sewn, clipped and ironed flat, with the exception of the collar seam. It still needs to be clipped and ironed. The next stage is to attach the lining, which has also been assmebled. After the lining is sewn to the shell and the necessary seams finished, I'll be adding a row of hooks and eyes to fasten the front. I love how the color of the silk/wool changes in sunlight to a pretty tangerine color. :)

6-06-02

Been a while since the last update, but rest assured, I haven't given up on this project or anything. I've just been going slowly.

These pictures show what I've been up to lately. For a while I was agonizing over how I was going to apply the trim to the bodice, since I had chosen to do curved bust seams. My options were to either just sew the trim down the center front and let that be that, or to take a chance and try to cover the side seams on the front and back of the doublet. This wasn't such a big deal on the back of the doublet, as the seams there are fairly straight, but the front seams have a major curve from the armpit to the swell of the bust, and the sari trim wasn't exactly that flexible, which meant I would have to pleat the trim somehow around the curve. I'm still trying to figure out how to do this... In the middle picture, you can see that I've taken a dart, so to speak, in order to make the trim conform to the curve of the bust.

NEXT