Monday, August 31, 2015

The Fabric Has Arrived!

From top to bottom; binding, dress, lining
The fabric that has arrived are the two fabrics I needed for my lined wrapped apron dress:  the chocolate brown wool and the (replacement) off-white mid-weight linen.  It's late, and I'm not up to adding the necessary photographs to show the wonderfulness of the combination of fabrics that I'm planning right now, but I should be able to get to that in a day or two.
Good view of the wool's weave but the color is off.
EDIT (9/1/2015): Here are a few quick pictures of the three fabrics I've obtained for the project: the wool for the outer layer of the apron dress, the linen for the lining, and the red silk for the top trim/binding.  

The wool is a mid-weight wool with a slightly napped finish, and the linen is Fabrics-store.com's best-selling middle-weight linen in an off-white color.  I bought the red silk several years ago.  It doesn't show up as well in the photographs, but it's a taffeta weave and supposedly is 100% silk in fiber content. The top photograph gives the best rendition of the colors of the fabrics and the best view of the linen's weave, and the bottom one best shows the weave of the wool.  Both pictures should be clickable for a better detail view.

Now I have suitable fabrics for the project!  Hopefully the construction will also go well.

4 comments:

  1. Wow, it's going to look lovely when it's made up! I'm very interested to see how it will behave with the lining in place too. I wonder if the lining will have a significant effect on the look and drape of the finished piece.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder how it will affect the drape, too. I think it will cause the dress to hang more stiffly and behave more like a tube-shaped dress, but until I make it I won't know for certain.

      Delete
    2. I'm imagining a very tube-shaped garment too, which is interesting in that it's quite different from the aesthetic that, say, the Hedeby fragment suggests (if I recall correctly it has a dart). When you look at all the various apron dress fragments, it seems the garment could vary quite a lot.

      Delete
    3. There is what sure looks like a dart on the Hedeby fragment but 1) it's a later find than many Viking age finds; 2) the evidence is ambiguous about whether it's from an apron dress or some other garment (though i think that it could be from an apron dress).

      Delete