help, i'm a giant couch

By popular demand (ok, by demand of Julie and Niter), here are a couple of shots of the giant-couch-of-doom dress in progress. A number of things still need to happen to it. Namely, it needs a hem, the sleeves are held on only by a single pin apiece at the moment, and yes, that's my plain old unadorned corset there. I'm thinking about what to do about that at the moment. So then, here are the front and back shots of the dress:


 

I think my favorite shot is the back. It kind of looks like those woodcuts, huh? I mean the bigness of the posterior and all. And let's all take a moment (Anita) to rejoice at the relative levelness of the motifs in the skirt. Yay math. I think the most obvious thing from these pictures is that the camicia needs work. I thought that I made the sleeves long enough to pull through the gaps in the sleeves, but obviously not. I think my sleeve lengths got skewed when I actually laced a bodice over them, since the body of the thing is so wide. Everything got kind of pulled up. Also, I don't like the neckline. It gaps and pooches and generally looks pretty poor. I'll have to look into it. The dress engineer was asking whether the camicia (ok, he said shirt) was supposed to show on the sides in the back and I had no idea. Anyone?

Other than that though, I'm not terribly displeased. You can see in the front shot how my fingers are disappearing into the piles upon piles of fabric on my hips, mostly due to the obnoxiously yellow felt underneath. The dress is half armor, half padding! And all couch.

Here's a shot of the front of the waist. Sorry about the Christmas ribbon again. It's hard to see what's going on (due to the insane amounts of busy-ness no doubt), but basically there's a 12 inch slit going down the front from the point. There's nothing holding it together at the moment, just lots of pleats. Julie, can you kind of see how the center two pleats are perpendicular to the floor? They're not trying to force the front slit open at all and it just sort of gets lost in the folds......just a thought for yours.


 

Here's the dress engineer's favorite shot.....the "butt boning." I think maybe I'm having less trouble here because I am simply not trying to pleat nearly as much fabric in there. You can see the pleats get a bit wonky in the middle, but I think it looks ok when I'm walking around. Also, the aforementioned butt boning doesn't quite go down into the point. There's about an inch of unboned bodice at the point. I don't remember why I did that, but I think that's helping prevent all those various stresses at that point too, since the fabric obviously gives more than boning does. Oh, and may I just say that this dress does nothing for butt-reduction. It's freakin' huge. Anyway.


 

And finally, just because I hammed for the camera and I think it's kind of funny: