Snow White’s Mirror Mirror Dress~ Part 2

I finished parts of the costume enough to make another post! I made the skirt of the costume before the bodice, but I decided to talk about the bodice before the skirt because how I made it is still fresh in my mind.

Here’s what the bodice I made looks like without the lining and boning sewn in…

The construction of the bodice is fairly straightforward. I used Simplicity’s #1728 for the bodice. I’ve already used this pattern to make another costume’s bodice so I knew how to work with it. I had lengthened the pattern because commercial patterns are generally shorter than my torso. Sometime it’s a little, sometimes it’s a lot. For this pattern, I lengthened it a few inches so the completed bodice will hit the top of my hips. It’s not the most drastic pattern lengthening I’ve done, but it was annoying. Fortunately, I used the same lengthened pattern for two other costume bodices so it was a necessary annoyance.

I used the wrong side of light blue poly satin for most of the dress. Like I said in an earlier post, poly satin is too shinny for the light blue parts of the dress but the wrong side isn’t. I did run into a few snags while I ironed the interfacing onto the right side of the satin. The satin was awfully slippery and it didn’t fuse the interfacing very well. It did fuse with the interfacing, but it took longer than normal.

Probably the hardest part of the whole bodice was finding something that will go in the mid section of the bodice. Here’s what I’m talking about….

The mid section of the bodice looks like it’s diamond pin tucked. I thought it would look really nice if I pin tucked the same fabric I made the bodice out of, so I tried it. It didn’t really work, mostly because I never tried to sew pin tucks before and I couldn’t find a tutorial online that explained how to make diamond pin tucks.

I’ll keep working on it, but for this dress it wouldn’t workout.

Instead of making the pin tucked fabric myself, I went to Joann’s and found some turquoise diamond pin tucked taffeta fabric in the clearance section of the store. It still cost about the same amount of money the pin tucked fabric online was being sold for, but I chose this fabric because I could see the color in person. Although it wasn’t light blue fabric, it still looked good beside the light blue fabric. I wasn’t going for 100% accuracy with this dress so I was ok with the inaccurate color. 🙂

I cut out the mid section of the dress and this is what it looked like before I sewed it to the rest of the bodice…

I backed the taffeta using a piece of the same satin I used for the rest of the bodice. The satin was interfaced just like the rest of the bodice pieces. I think I should have heat n’ bonded the taffeta to the satin, but I’m used to not using heat n’ bond so I didn’t think of it. Instead, I base stitched the taffeta to the satin. That worked well for me. 🙂

So that’s the bodice! I still need to finish sewing the zipper and lining fabric onto the bodice before I can move onto the sleeves. I ordered some orange fabric for the lower sleeves online so the fabric might take some time to get to my house. In the mean time I’ll finish what I can on this dress. Once I’ve done everything I can without the fabric, I’ll probably move on to work on something else. 🙂

EDIT: I just realized a mistake I made in this post. The mid-section of the bodice is not pin-tucked. It’s actually smocked. I already finished my bodice so I won’t be smocking my bodice, but if you want to here’s some links to explanations about how to smock if you’d like to smock your own bodice…

How to Smock by Hand on eHow.com

How to Smock on The Dress I Made

There is also a tutorial for smocking by hand in the June/July 2013 issue of Threads magazine.