Countdown to the Ball: 30, 29...

I started with my dress, since I'm a little harder to fit but my dress will also be less complicated. I chose late 15th century Florence for mine for a couple reasons: the fabrics are lovely and also stand on their own, without a lot of heavy decoration, the tight sleeves don't impede the wheelchair, and the higher waistline is more forgiving and requires much less in the way of underpinning structure. No corsetry, stays, bum rolls or farthingales. Very easy to work with the chair.

The decision to use only stash fabrics means that I had to be creative with cutting my fashion fabric. I was lucky to have enough for a skirt front and back panel, and just barely enough to cut the bodice but no room for error. I also needed to cut the straps as a separate piece from the front, since I didn't have enough space to keep it complete. Luckily the wheelchair means that skirts don't need lots of flare or a train- and it often works better with less width in the skirt because that's just more fabric to try to sit on or get caught in my casters.

I first made my mockup out of the cotton duck cloth (from the stash!) that I was hoping to use as the interlining. I needed to cut down the shoulder straps quite a bit to get the range of motion that I needed, and I also found that I preferred the shorter, just under the bust, waistline to the longer style. Taking inspiration from Festive Attyre's blog posts on her Florentine gown, I also decided to add cording to give the bodice structure. I know there's not period evidence for it, but I have a fairly high injury level and my posture is very rounded and just generally terrible and I wanted to give the dress as much help as possible to stay smooth and unbuckled, even as I collapse like a soufflé.

Adam found some 1/16" hemp twine in his stash, so I make two layers of each piece in the duck cloth and sewed many channels for the cording. I then used a long piece of wire to pull a doubled piece of twine through each channel.

I then sewed all the way around the outside twice and added a couple lines of stitching across the larger sections of cording to help hold things in place. The pieces were then attached to the red wool flatlining and the whole thing was sewn to the fashion fabric.

And then the pieces were sewn together and the seams pressed open.