The Merida Cosplay - part 2

Step 4 - Sewing the dress

Sewing a midieval dress is fairly straightforward. After all, patterns were simple and people back then had no sewing machines. When it comes to making the adaptions for Merida, the following is worth noting:

a) Lacing. In order to actually get into a dress that's as snug as Merida's, you will need some kind of lacing. That is the old school version of a zipper. Usually, these dresses had either a backlacing or sidelacing(s). I went for a backlacing, since that will be practically invisible beneath Merida's hair. Side lacing is harder to conceal. The drawback is that it is very difficult to dress yourself in a dress with backlacing. I will need help dressing. To finish the lacing I will add metal eyelets and, hopefully, cover those metal eyelets with thread. Metal makes the garment more durable, but metal was not actually used in this way. Eyelets were stitched. You can however cover them beautifully with thread.

b) Attaching the sleeves. The paned sleeves on Merida's dress can be sewn in one piece, but in real life this model would probably have been tied. This was so that women would wear the same dress with different sleeves. For everyday stuff, you would wear sleeves like Merida's, and for party time you might wear more extravagant flared sleeves. In summer you might ever remove them alltogether and just have your underdress' lighter sleeves showing. In modern day, we can cheat a little bit on some details to make dressing easier. I tried out hooks for the sleeves, but it didn't work well, so I finally settled on snap buttons. 

Below, progress shots of the dress on the form. It ended up a bit too big due to a bug in the pattern sizing. It has yet to be fit to my shape and the seams will later be pressed to give it that nice and flat wool look. The white fabric is just a blouse I put on below to help fit the sleeves and get the right amount of gap between the panes. So far I'm pretty happy with it. can't wait to put some accessories on there!