I haven't written in a while, but I've been the busy little seamstress. It's just been slow going due to a lot of hand work lately. I am very, *very* close on my petticoat bodies. I was having a crisis for a while because I wanted to use the gold silk from the corset binding for a guard around the bottom, but was mightily paranoid about having enough. The gold silk came to me courtesy of Mistress Bianca, and largely consisted of one or two large pieces (that I hacked into greedily for the corset binding) and several much smaller bias-cut triangles. I ended up sewing all of the triangles together into a super bias trapezoid in an effort to eke as much length from it as possible, and I managed to get all I needed with some to spare. The corset still needs a small amount of binding around the inside of the armhole, but I'm waiting on it until I can really test out the wear to see if there needs to be any adjustment first. The petticoat just needs a few eyelets to fasten in the front to be functional, and I'm suddenly on the fence on whether or not I want to do eyelets all the way around the waist to correspond with those on the corset tabs. It might just be more trouble than its worth.
I do love it though. The gold silk looks fantastic against the green linen, and the skirt itself is very full (4x my waist measurement). I can easily rock out the sort of wenchy bodice look in my corset-and-petticoat, and I'm very eager (after the challenge) to make an elizabethan-style jacket out of some lovely green shetland wool I got a while ago to make it respectably middle class.
With all of the effort into my underwear and with less than 100 days until the end of the challenge, I'm seriously considering calling my petticoat bodies my "intermediate" layer and foregoing the loose gown. That way I can devote my time and attention to the blue silk gown and all of the necessary frippery without having another garment hanging over me.
Here's to pictures as soon as I finish the last bits and find my camera!
