Inspired by the lady in blue from Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Resurrection of the Boy (circa 1484), I’m working on making a cold-weather cioppa to go with my black and lavender gamurre. I’m using a grey cotton velveteen, but I’ll line the bodice with something smoother (either linen or silk) since my gamurre are wool.
I realized this morning that my fabric measures 55″ x 200″. And it occurred to me that I could make either one very full-skirted dress or two with less full skirts. The arrangement below uses only half the fabric and still gives me plenty of skirt. It does have elbow-length sleeves instead of long ones, however, and the front and back halves of the bodice don’t match in nap direction. (I use to-scale paper pattern pieces I made to help me lay out dresses with small amounts of fabric.)
But since I was planning to cartridge pleat the skirt (on a tip from Mistress Juliana about wear patterns with velveteen in knife pleats), I’m not sure how well that would work with the amount of fabric I have. The waist of the skirt would be roughly 80 inches and the waist of the bodice roughly 32 inches, giving me 5 inches of skirt to pleat to every 2 inches of bodice.
I’m also not totally sure that this skirt pattern would work as well as I would like, since the (very slight, but still existent) nap would run in the opposite direction in one of the tapered panels from the rest of the skirt.
I do really like the idea of being able to get two dresses instead of one out of this fabric, though. So I am having a lot of trouble deciding which option I want. And since I want to have this done by Castle Wars I have slightly less than two weeks in which to decide and do all my sewing.