I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger recently…. I’ve just felt so grey lately because everything in Toronto these days is just grey, greyer and greyest.  Today it rained, so the sky was grey, the pavement was grey, the grass was grey and the air was grey…. you get the picture!  It gets under one’s skin and seeps into one’s psyche in March.

But onto more cheerful things!   Cinderella’s new dress is complete.  I had a tremendous amount of fun putting this together.  I boned the front and piped the bodice.

Here’s a picture of the bow and peplum from the back.  I did a CB lapped zipper, and was at a bit of a loss about how to attach the bow as it’s quite a substantial piece of ornamentation.  I decided to attach the ends of the bow separately from the bow itself.  So I stitched the bow ends to either side of the CB zipper at the bottom of the bodice back.

Then I stitched the left side of the bow to the bodice itself in two places to hold it into place, and used 1cm snap fasteners to attach the bow on the right side.  They should hold it in place and be immune to spontaneous unsnapping!

I added two things to the sleeves:  a bottom narrow band and puffs at the cap to maintain the sleeve height.  The band has a small 7 cm length of elastic at the front.  I left the casing/binding smooth under the arm.  I also substantially increased the height and width of the sleeve because I thought the sleeves were too plain.  You can see how I slashed and spread the pattern here to get the extra volume.

I changed the peplums, too.  They just didn’t add anything interesting to the dress the way they were originally intended, so I added pleats at the back to pull the fullness into a pretty sweep like a true peplum.

This probably would have been unnecessary if I’d had a full gathered skirt à la Simplicity 2813 with all the skirt gathers to support the peplum, but a 7-gore skirt is more flattering across the hips!

There’s a lot of fabric at the hem – about 5 metres – so it’s a great twirling dress.  I’ve just got to bind the armscye with the polycotton underlining to keep the stiff organza sleeve seam allowances from being irritable and add strap keepers to the bodice to finish the “finishing”. This was a lot of work, but a lot of fun!