The tudor dress is finished. With several days to spare, I might add, which would make this something of a new record. It'll probably need to be tweaked when Holly gets here on Friday, but tweaking is not sewing, so it doesn't count.
The fabric dilemma ended up being solved by this: When I tried to order the fabric online, rush shipping in order to get it from one side of the country to the other in time to cut and sew it would have cost more than the fabric itself. I started calling around to Joann fabrics in teh area and found one in Wilkesbarre (remember, the one I was supposed to go to weeks ago because they SAID that they had the fabric?) Jake and I headed out early Saturday morning and found deep, lovely blue velvet. Polyester velvet. Not usually a fan of polyester but in a pinch I'm not too proud to take opportunity when it is given. The problem was that it was much much deeper blue than the original fabric so the lower sleeves had to be pulled apart and redone. Adam said I was a nutball for doing that on a deadline but I know that if I didn't fix the sleeves, I would be sitting in front of Hols all night going "Holly, put those sleeves away. Don't let anyone see those. " In the interest of conserving fabric, the back of the sleeves are lined in ivory silk, since no one ever really sees them anyway.
Kirtle for Hols. Laces up the back (currently with yarn but we'll find something more durable for Saturday). The front skirt and bodice are made out of a very pale blue brocade with tiny ivory maltese crosses. The rest of the dress is made from a cream brocade that I didn't like as much. Since it'll never be seen, it doesn't matter.
The skirt doesn't actually crumple like that at the bottom in real life, my dress form was made to be very short so that I could dress it without falling out of my chair.
The ouches were done differently than I had hoped because the "stones" I got were horrible plastic. Aryclics can sometimes look like glass, these were definately plastic. Bad, elementary craft school level, "let's make a macaroni necklace and popsicle stick picture frame for mom" jewels. So I used the settings but put a tiny glass pearl in the center of them, which while not as cool as the original plan, looks pretty decent. If I could only talk Adam into that kiln...
I know that one pearl is off. I'm going to go fix it now as it's annoying the crap out of me.
