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Well. Here we are again. After the completion of our most recent Renaissance dresses, the Blue Bee dresses, I asked Rachel if we had enough dresses for festivals and faires. What a silly question. Red seems to be the one color we haven't really explored, and is the other royal court color besides blue. We knew we wanted to stay away from a pink-red or orange-red. And after our forays into Italian and English styles, it was time to once again embrace our genetic heritage and go with a German style.  I took the opportunity to sketch out the costume design digitally for the first time - usually I use a pencil. I'm happy with the way it turned out - for my first time. But (spoilers), about from the time I clicked "save", I knew I'd be making changes to the design. So be sure to keep up with the twists and turns on this one, as I know this will be a multiple-post project. Rachel is fantastic at using unexpected, budget friendly fabric in her Renaissance dresses. But I wanted to take the excuse to be very deliberate (and, I'll admit it, "boojee"). Linen was an obvious choice, but I wanted it to be a bit lighter in weight than the blue linen we'd used before, and I was after a particular shade of red. As I live in an, ahem, "fabric desert", about the only way to achieve this is to order swatches from an online store first. I wanted a near-tissue weight linen for the shirt, and a light-medium weight for the dress. After finding what I wanted from Fabric-Store.com (which specializes in linen) I took a picture of the fabric swatches with a fork as background to compare weight and color.
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As a librarian by day, I am no stranger to research and gathering information. As a successful post graduate I also know once you think you've plumbed the depths of current information a new source pops up. So, it was little to no surprise that my first serious foray into researching actual costume construction (instead of cobbling together my sewing skills, Pinterest, and general thriftiness) yielded no less than 12 books to source. There was no way in heck I was paying $25-$50 for each book from Amazon, though that is where I did my initial research to find them. Inter-library loan to the rescue! I've looked through 8 books so far, copied the pertinent pages, and even bought one that was particularly useful. Or at least it had shiny colorful pages:  Here are links to the others I've had the chance to look through and recommend:
Besides, I believe in my last blog post I said I would post sources for "L"'s actual purple dress. So, below is a complete list of where I got materials, patterns, and inspiration for that particular dress.
And believe it or not, that was the end of my inspiration online. The rest came as I was sewing. I really was copying another dress I had so it was pretty easy. And yes! The dress is done! I'll be doing a series of posts next on how that went. Hopefully after that comes updates on my husband's doublet. We've had illnesses and family deaths, so things are going a bit slower there. In the mean time, here's a preview of the purple dress reborn:  |
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