the gauntlet

The illustrious Julie and I have jointly admitted to ourselves that our next costume deadline is...oops....October 1. We were allegedly going to do marvelous things in time for the MD Faire, but we were apparently kidding ourselves. So what will we do, you ask? What any reasonable person would do; we'll skip making our husbands new clothes and make ourselves a new dress instead. That's reasonable. Our objective is pretty simple: one Flemish kirtle apiece. And a shift for me. This way we can match our uppity handmaiden Niter and have all the comfort that our Venetian outfits do not for one day at least!

So last night, in accordance with this new plan, I pulled out the fabric intended for the Flemish outfit.

I then tried on the corded bodice that I'd made with the idea that it would be the foundation for this outfit. I agonized for a while over how to deal with the curves in it. Then I got the bright idea of trying on a couple of older dresses (with straight seams) over it just to see what would happen. What happens is that the dress bridges a bit the underbust curve and doesn't look that bad...BUT...I don't like the way anything looks over the corded bodice. There are a couple of factors. First, the straps are very wide for comfort, and the sides are cut up reasonably high under the arms to keep everything in place. This is a bit of a problem because the bodice tends to stick out from under other dresses. In other words, I made it with as much coverage as a dress bodice. Didn't think that through, obviously. In order to cover the corded bodice, my dress bodice will need to be ridiculously restrictive under the arms. Darn it. Then too, the cording in the bodice adds to my girth. It looks kinda poochy since the corded bodice doesn't really compress anything below the bust anyway. I just don't like it. This is pretty irksome.

I think in light of this, I may be trying to bone the kirtle and use it for support. Julie managed to wear her side-back-lacing Venetian dress without the corset by putting in some boning, so I'm hoping it may work for me. I'm thinking that I want side-lacing on this kirtle, for no particular reason except that I kind of think it looks cool, although I might go with back-lacing for the much more logical reason that then I only need half as many eyelets. Opinion?