Fabric choices

The fabric for the Lucy dress mostly came online from Fashion Fabrics Club. (And I paid for every last inch of it, including the hefty shipping fees. Fabric is heavy.) I went with them, honestly, because they had the dark orange velvet for the sleeves, and when I started poking around they had most of everything else, as well.

Starting from the top ... sleeve lining from Joanne's. This is visible here:

Next ... the bodice fabric. We went round and round on this one.

This really looks like an unbleached linen with a print on it to me. I couldn't find anything like this. I looked for printed linen, embroidered linen ... I even thought about trying to print or embroider it myself, but I had a brief flash of sanity and dismissed the ideas. I could have gone with the plain, unbleached linen, but FFC had and embroidered silk on sale for less than what the linen cost, so we went with that. It was a bit of a crap shoot, as the picture looked like the unbleached linen, but the description said "copper", but it looks like it will work out just fine.

The white is a cotton/rayon twill for the underskirt.

The velvet is for the sleeves, obviously, and I had forgotten just how much I HATE working with synthetic stretch fabrics. I was very creative with my vocabulary there for a bit.

Next up is the shift/chemise/undershirt whatever-you-want-to-call-it fabric. You'll notice in the bodice picture it's a sort of greenish color, and has a very subtle embroidery design around the neckline. We picked up a piece of quilting cotton, again at Joanne's, and had to get rather creative on cutting it out. More on that later ...

And, at the bottom of the pile, is the dark orange twill overskirt fabric. Close inspection of the photo indicates that it's a silk dupioni to me, but I couldn't find any the right color. And the cotton was much, much cheaper. Heavier, too, but that was a compromise between availability, cost and how the final product would drape.

Besides, it's just a costume, right?