Belle Ballgown - Shaping the Skirt

This time around, I'm not going to cut into the beautiful gold fabric until I have a complete mockup.  In the past, I'd get a bit of a mockup started and then jump right into real fabric, inevitably making mistakes and having to work with what I'd already cut out. That means that every part of the dress will be figured out first.  It may take longer, but I should have a better final result.

The pattern I selected for Belle's gown has five large pieces in the skirt. According to the film, Belle's dress should have eight sections. This means I have to do some figuring out to turn five (or ten) segments into eight. The plan is to make the exact same skirt but with different seam lines so I can easily create the eight gathered segments.

First I measured the circumference of the bottom of the skirt, and came up with around 185".  I divided that by 8 and rounded the result up to 23-1/4". Starting at the center front of the skirt, I began to mark every 23-1/4" section.  The back two sections are a bit smaller (I probably mis-measured the skirt slightly), but as long as the dress is symmetrical on both sides, I'm ok with that.

Next, I pinned a ribbon from the center waistband edge to the center bottom. The back is easy, because there's already a back seam going from top to bottom. Then I pinned ribbons from the top to bottom along the three in-between points I marked on the right side of the skirt.  The left and right sides are the same, so I only have to do one half of the skirt this way.

Then I took it off the dressform and ungathered the waistband. Using the ribbons as lines, I traced new pattern pieces from the mockup skirt, and then straightened them out using a yardstick.  This will be a second skirt mockup to test the gathering for the top layer of the skirt. It should be exactly the same as the under skirt, but divided into eight pieces.

I serged all four edges of the overskirt pieces (so they wouldn't shred away while working with them), and sewed them into a new skirt. On this mockup overskirt, I'll determine if the overskirt pieces are long enough once they're gathered, or if I need to add more length to them.

Next I sewed up all 8 pieces into a single skirt.  Then I added gathering stitches (just to test) along two of the seams.  I sewed the gathering stitches inside the seam, which worked a lot better than what I did on my first dress - gathering each individual skirt piece and then sewing them all together. The bottom of the skirt looked great, but the top edge was far too wide. Gathering it (as the pattern called for) made the draping look strange.

I determined that each segment of the skirt should become 7" wide at the top (7" x 8 = 56"), since I'd lose about 1" per side with the seam allowance and gathering to make the draping.  I marked this on each piece, and safety pinned the pieces together at that new waist mark.  Then I turned the dress inside out on the dress form and hoop, and marked a diagonal line with pins from the new waist mark to take up the excess fabric. Essentially, I removed a triangle shape from the top of each seam.  This also had the benefit of giving each piece a consistent width at the top.

Finally, after all of these strange adjustments, I gathered the seam lines on half of the dress, and adjusted the draping. This gives me the look I wanted for the skirt.

Belle's hairbow and first photoshoot pics

One of the things I didn't like about my original Belle hairbow was that I put it on a plain black elastic.  It looked "fake" to me because the ribbon didn't appear to wrap around the ponytail - it was just floating there.  When I made my new hairbow, I decided to make a bow and a scrunchie out of the same fabric. 

To make the scrunchie, I used one I already had as a template.  I made a fabric tube, which I sewed along one side then turned inside out.  I cut a piece of narrow elastic (smaller than the tube), attached a large safety pin to one side, and pulled it through the tube.  I used a zigzag stitch to sew the two ends of elastic together, and handsewed the scrunchie closed.

The bow section is a sewn rectangle of fabric with interfacing in the middle, and the center "knot" of the bow wraps around both the bow and the scrunchie, holding the two pieces together. This is glued together, and then handsewn to reinforce the connection.  The interfacing inside the rectangle keeps the bow from becoming floppy.  It might be a little too big, but I'd rather it be a little big than hard to see.

And then... a few preliminary photoshoot pictures!  The farmers' market was rained out, so the princesses had a small photoshoot instead!