Arsenic green part 2

I am only buttons away form being finished with my arsenic green dreams dress. Literally, I have to find some buttons and then it is done. 

I'm having it for the Dickensian Christmas fair this year. It's not really very Dickensian (that tends to be either Regency or mid Victorian) but it is Victorian! and it turns out my friend Michelle does way better in a bonnet than I do.. Still, I'm pretty happy with my dress! 

I've made it in the style of the mid 1880's but I like to make it look a little bit unfashionable partly because I think it suits me better. If this was actually that time and I was really a Victorian I would be a lower middle class housewife with eccentric tendencies all the same, so it feels more at home to be..me.

In the past I've made the highneck collars of the 1880's but they do bore me.. I know everyone had them but would I have? That's always what I think when I make them and so this time I didn't. It adds to the unfashionability of it as well since a low neckline is an earlier fashion than the bustle at the back and I kind of like that..

The bustle was this ones annoyance though! There's always one thing that I get stuck on.. It's usually the sleeves or the neckline so I kept my eyes on that so much that the lower back part went off on a weird one. In the end I got it fixed but as one might notice it made the back a little shorter than expected. But I decided to be fine with that. For the most part the bustle will be made up of the green skirt since the apron skirt might just stay as a front piece.

That's another historically accurate piece, the apron skirt. Somewhere in the early 1880's the detachable part of the 1870's bustle swings to the front and becomes like an apron. I quite like the look of that, it makes it look like one is walking in a strange duck-like way. 

And speaking of historically accurate, I have not been so proud of a discovery for ages as I was when I last time discovered the right way to angle the fabric to make the stripes go in the historically accurate looking direction. So proud! (selvedge in the sides, not in the front/back) So this one is, now deliberately, made in the same way.

Now there are only the buttons left. 

The gloves are actually a pretty clever idea that Michelle, my partner in...sewing? had a few days ago. My sleeves are a little short for wintertime, and it is getting pretty freezing even in Kent, so I cut a kneesock in half and sewed it into my crochet cloves for warmth. We'll see how that turns out..

Undecided about the hat yet...I might have to turn to google for inspiration.

To be continued..