Welmoed's Ball Gown

Made March 2000

Here it is!!!

This is the ball gown I made to wear to a charity auction on March 31. This is a picture of me in the gown at the party. Do I look happy? I had only finished the last of the hemming about two hours before this picture was taken. Whew!!

The dress is based on Vintage Vogue pattern number 2239. I had to alter it a bit to lengthen the bodice and give a little more room in the chest. Then I created a pattern for the overskirt, which was embroidered with about 70 flower and insect motifs. The underskirt is appliquéd with "blades of grass" of silk dupioni, which is what the rest of the dress is made of. The overskirt is silk organza. All fabrics were purchased at G Street Fabrics in Rockville, MD.

Now for the details...

The dress itself was remarkably easy to construct; I credit Vogue for their clear instructions. Even the boning wasn't too much of a challenge. The worst part of the whole experience was dealing with the fraying of the silk. That was a trial! Those little threads got everywhere.

This photo shows the front of the gown skirt. You can see the "blades of grass" showing under the organza. I had wanted to wear a crinoline with the dress (and, indeed, it needed one) but I didn't have one.

Here are some of the embroideries:

For most of the embroideries, especially the clusters of three small flowers motif, I didn't use any stabilizer at all. For some of the larger embroideries, I experimented with either tear-away or Solvy, sometimes using both. The organza was a dream to embroider on; only a few times did I get pulled threads in the fabric.

Most of the designs were downloaded from various sites on the internet; I apologize in advance that I cannot document where each of them came from. The tiger butterfly shown above is one of my favorites; he appears twice on the dress and lots of people pointed it out. I'm going to embroider it on a shirt for my husband, the tiger fan. Most of the mail I get about this dress is to ask me where I got the design. I downloaded it from Ann the Gran's site, under "Animals".

The back of the gown. I embroidered these panels first, figuring that they wouldn't be seen as much as the front, so mistakes wouldn't be as obvious.

The back gores are wider than the front, giving the whole dress a small train. This would have been more noticeable if I had worn a crinoline.

Small Details

The silk dupioni fabric was a royal pain to applique; that's the last time I'll tackle anything like that again!! For the first dozen "blades of grass", I stitched a rough leaf shape of green silk onto the blue silk, then trimmed with applique scissors. Then I went back and satin stitched all the blades. Unfortunately, I had trimmed too close to the stitching and the silk frayed, so some of the leaves had come loose. What fun. So for the final dozen leaves I sewed conical tubes, turned and pressed them, then stitched them down with a double needle. These looked so much better, I wish I had done them all that way.

For the overskirt, all the seams were done as French seams. The hem of the overskirt was done with a 3-thread rolled hem on my serger.

The rest of the seams were done on my Viking 150E. I am now very grateful I didn't trade that machine in when I bought my #1+. While the #1+ was doing the embroidery, I was busy assembling the rest of the dress. If I hadn't had the other machine, the dress would have taken three times as long to complete.

The inside story: all raw edges on the bodice were enclosed. Instead of using a bias strip of lining to create the band facing, as the pattern instructed, I used a length of grosgrain ribbon. It worked like a charm and saved me some time.

Finishing off the dress is a self-fabric belt with a fabric-covered buckle.

If I've left out any details, please let me know!

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