#project blogging

So the thought behind this dress started when I was cleaning out my fabric stash and remembered that I have my grandma’s robe. I lived with my grandma for a great deal of my childhood, and took care of her as she started declining. Towards the end, when she was on hospice, she basically lived in this robe, but even before that, I have so many memories of sitting in the morning drinking tea and watching the news, or watching Warehouse 13 in the evenings. She’s always wearing this robe in those memories. My grandma taught me how to sew, but I didn’t really get into it until this past year when I got into the SCA. Now that I’m sewing more, I want to make something special to use the skills I’ve finally been cultivating, and to honor her. And so I started looking for the right type of dress to work the fabric into.

I knew right away that this was going to be different from my past dresses, because I’ve done very simple 14th century stuff with little shaping, and I’ve worked mostly in linen and wool, with a little cotton (I have very good luck with thrift store fabric). Because the robe is a cotton velvet/poly blend, I wasn’t going to be able to let the fabric speak for itself like I have in the past. And also, velvet should go on something fancy. I was initially thinking of doing one of those cotehardies with long sleeves that have a contrasting lining color, since the robe doesn’t have enough fabric to be the main part of the dress. And then, I found this:

You can’t really see it in the pic above (hi, grandma!), but the robe has these fancy embroidered collar and cuffs. As soon as I say the Burgundian style, I knew it would be the perfect way to use the robe and highlight the cool parts of it.

Next step was to do a sketch, which was a trial because I am not really confident in my drawing abilities, but I think it turned out okay. So this is the plan:

I’m also planning to line the top part of the dress in the robe fabric. Should feel kind of like a hug, which I like the thought of. 

I went fabric shopping, and let me tell you, finding 8 yards of anything that is a) the right color, b) within my price range, and c) actually has the yardage in one place, is a challenge. I actually ended up having to get fabric from 2 different bolts. But I did end up with something I really like, a super silky poly blend with a really nice visual that looks more like real silk than a lot of synthetics I’m used to. Here’s the fabric on my draping form with the robe: