Me vs the English language

The pattern I used, Simplicity 3782, is on the far left. I paid $17.95 for it.

As I've already told you, I'm from Finland and my native language is Finnish. I've studied English at school since I was nine. I know the basics and I can make myself understood in everyday situations. I can read books in English without much (or any!) help from the dictionary. And I thought that I would manage with English sewing instructions. How foolish of me. Sewing this dress has been a constant struggle with the English language. The English sewing words confused me. It was challenging, but fun and I learned loads. 

I started by making an underskirt. That was quite easy, and I hadn't nearly any difficulties following the instructions. Simplicity recommends that a hoopskirt should be used with this dress. I don't own one, and I wasn't willing to purchase one, so I used an extra underskirt made out of very thin foam. It once belonged to my aunt. In these photos I have it under the underskirt. 

That orange looks hideous, but I did save some money by not buying red fabric for the entire underskirt :D

I made a bumroll following the instructions, but ended up not using it. It made the dress look bigger than in the movie.

 

Bumroll

Here's the dress with the bumroll...

...and here it is without it.

The picture above was taken on the mornig of our schools annual "costume party". You can see the entire costume in it. I think the golden fabric looks really great. I didn't waste all those hours I used textile printing the pattern on it after all!

 Sewing the underskirt was just a warm-up for sewing the bodice and the sleeves. For one thing, I had picked the wrong size, and I had to scale down everything. There was also the question of how I was going to get into my costume. If I'd follow the pattern, the dress would have buttons on the front. But if I that was the case, what would happen to the golden front panel? Another option was to put a keychain to the back of the dress. That would possibly make it difficult to get my hands trough the sleeves. After some thinking (this happened late at night, mind you) my mum and I came up with a "creative" idea. I'm not going to the details (they're nothing important because I don't recommend this option to you), but lets just say it included safety pins and velcro.

The sleeves had to be scaled down as well. I used golden and black fabrics and ribbons made out of the same red fabric I used for the underskirt. I glued some red rhinestones to the red ribbons (this happened at 1:30 AM!). I made the puffs a lot bigger than they were in Simplicitys pattern. I made the pattern to the black and white cuffs myself, using - once again - textile printing.

Next some details: the white collar and the golden front panel. The front panel was quite simple to make. I cut two triangles of golden fabric and one of buckram and sewed them together, making one triangle that was golden on both sides. Then I created some red lines by sewing very thickset stitches with red thread. I added rhinestones and plastic pearls for decoration.

The collar was something of a challenge, because it needed to stay up almost horizontally. I used thin foam sewed inside fabric to give the collar some structure and stiffnes. The collar had to be made a lot bigger than in the original pattern. 

Here you can see the collar and the front panel

Finally I attached the golden skirt part to the bodice. When all this was done, I was pretty tired of sewing and the ridiculously mysterious sewing instructions. 

One of our cats (we have six of them) fell in love with my pincushion. I just had to take a picture :)