Gabriola the Second

I’ll forgive you if you don’t remember Gabriola the first; I couldn’t even remember if I’d blogged about it. Two years, eh? Anyway. I like this version better.

A few months ago I made a new corset. But it wasn’t in my usual colour scheme, so I needed some kind of bottom.

A few days ago, I went stash diving for fabric. As I said, it’s not one of my usual colours. Pickings were slim. But at last I settled on this piece of rather drab tie-dye with a subtle embroidered border. It’s from a range of border-embroidered fabrics that were already marked down when I first started at Fabricland, and I picked up the last bits of an embarrassing number of the pieces.  What can I say?

 Fortunately, I had about 4m of this particular one—what with trying to at least roughly match the scalloped border, I needed every bit of fabric.

It was so nice to have the pattern all traced and ready to go. I made a couple of little mods this time around strictly for style purposes. I added a placket at the back and buttons, instead of a zipper.

The buttons are all mother of pearl, from the Antique Button Stash—they roughly match, except for the big one at the top.

And I left a slit between the left and centre panels on the front.

It ends really high if you do it that way, by the way. I did plan for this by adding little eyelets and a lacing cord to close it up a bit, which had the added benefit of  gathering it up a little—a benefit because that seam must’ve stretched when I was doing the hemming (despite stay-stitching) because it’s the only part of the skirt that was too long. And you can’t adjust a border embroidery at the bottom.

I cut the embroidered overlays on the hips from the tiny scraps left over, so although I tried to get them mirroring left and right, the front and back are a bit different. On the other hand I managed to get all those points on the lower yokes to line up, which is good because had topstitched those panels with a cross stitch and that shit isn’t coming out.

Using the embroidered hem meant losing the curve along the bottom of the skirt pieces, which was a risk, but I think looks fine in this case, even if the finished hem is a bit angular and jagged.

All in all pretty happy! Not sure if it’ll be truly wearable or just another costume piece, but I sure do like it—considerably more than I thought I would, since the fabric was frankly kinda  boring and ugly.

The colour is not quite spot on for the corset (although it varies since it’s a tie-dye) but I think it’s close enough. If not, I think a bit of a tea bath will fix that, but I’m not going to rush things. I managed to cut a tiny bodice from the scraps, as you can see in the “nice” photos, so I should be able to wear it with that on a slightly more every-day basis than with the corset. I’ll talk about the bodice next, though!