The Wedding Dress -- Lined With Gold

The cream colored dupioni for the bodice and skirt lining arrived last week and yesterday I got right to work on the dress. Last week, while I was waiting for the fabric to arrive, I had cut out the underlining for the bodice. When DD and I went to Vogue fabric when she was here in November, one of the things we bought was cotton crinoline to use as the interlining for the bodice. Back last fall when I practiced putting boning in a bodice, I used the casing that came with the plastic boning. But it really was very thick -- kind of like heavy muslin -- and I wanted something much smoother and less bulky.

Lucky for me I remembered a blog that I read at Gertie's Blog for Better Sewing on using the underlining fabric to create your own channels for the boning. What a great idea!

The first thing that I did was cut 1 1/4 inch pieces of the crinoline for each channel that I needed. I wanted a channel for each seam line. They were cut to the lengths that I needed for each seam. The ones in the front are shorter so that the boning stops at just below the bust. I then folded the crinoline in half lengthwise.

I then pinned the channel just inside the seam line. You cannot see the white on white marked seam line here, but trust me it's there! Then with my sewing machine, I sewed on each side of the channel, attaching it firmly to the interlining. Then, of course, just like all the other interlining pieces, used that as the pattern to cut out the dupioni.




I kept going and cut out all the pieces of the skirt again for the lining in the cream dupioni. (See the picture at the top of the blog.) My next steps are to: mark the cream dupioni with the seam lines so that I can baste the lining together and finish the skirt after DD tries it on; hand baste together the interlining and dupioni of the bodice; cut out the white dupioni for the bodice wraps; fold and baste the folds of the wraps down so that they are ready to attach to the bodice base; cut out the pieces of the lining for the bodice. Insert the bra and boning into the bodice. . . I can't even list everything here, but this is what must be done in order to be ready for DD's arrival in two weeks! OH MY, I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO!!!

Happy freaking out! (I mean Sewing!)