Project Photos: Modified Butterick 4827 dress

This is my outfit for the ren faire. I started out with the Butterick 4827 pattern, but I got rid of the princess seams and back lacing and replaced them with side lacing. Otherwise I went by the pattern on both the dress and the underskirt. The dress is made from a navy satin and the underskirt is a lovely brocade.

The finished dress with the underskirt hanging up behind.

It has always been one of those things that I wanted to try making, but it was a bit more difficult than I expected. First off, I couldn't find any tutorials on how to put together a side lacing dress. This meant that I was pretty much on my own design wise. What I've come up with does leave an opening in the arm scythe above the lacing, and a bit of my white chemise will show through. The fit through the shoulders gets a bit weird, but I'm not sure if that has more to do with my alterations or the original pattern since I really only altered the seam lines on the side of the dress.

Dress before trim.

Then I had this brilliant idea that instead of fiddling around with grommets, I was going to hand sew the eyelets. (For some reason, it didn't occur to me that I had just added twice as many eyelets.) It took forever since I was dealing with fifty eyelets altogether. There were forty-six on handmade eyelet tapes, and a further four on the dress itself.

It's spiral laced, but it's hard to tell until it's on and fully cinched.

Once everything else was done I got to adding some trim around the cuffs and neckline, and that was a bit of a battle because it wouldn't sit right. After looking online I found out that I should've added in some pleats to make it curve with the neckline.

Sleeve

Here's the front of the neckline.

And a view of the back.

Woven jacquard trim!!

After doing all those modifications, it was nice to just follow the directions for the skirt. I did substitute the back panels with a plain black fabric just because I couldn't justify spending that much money for an extra yard of fabric that no one would ever see.

View of the front, There is a lot of fabric on this skirt, and it's hard to get it all in view!

Here's another front view.

And here's the back.

Anyhow, I have finally gotten everything put together and laced in place. It's gorgeous when I'm wearing it, but it looks like a bag on the hangar. Maybe after the faire I'll have some shots of me wearing it to share.