Camille's Reenactment Dress

I finally finished Camille's dress!!! I am so excited about how it turned out, because I didn't use a pattern. I wanted to make her dress sort of like mine, but as soon as I saw this style, I totally decided to do that instead.

Lizzie again helped me to draft the mock up. She took the pattern to the dress, and made it fit Camille, then chopped off the entire bottom piece so that was left was the top bit to make the yoke.
The bottom part of the bodice was a bit trickier for Lizzie, because she had to make it up. But she was able to pretty much just take a big rectangle and cut out a little bit at the side for more arm room.

 I did the skirt first. It went pretty much just like my dress, but faster, because I did 3 panels instead of 4. I was a little worried that gauging wouldn't turn out very good because there wasn't as much fabric to smoosh up, but it went better than I thought. Somehow, though, the gauging is uneven in the back. I don't know how that happened, but on one side in the back there is a bunch of gauging, and on the other side there isn't really any. Hmmm....
Here is a picture of the skirt before it was gauged:

 Lizzie gave me very clear instructions on the top, which really helped keep me on track. The only part that was really tricky was the waistband. I didn't do a waistband on my dress, so that sort of made it trickier. I had to sew the bodice to the waistband, then sew the skirt to a ribbon, then sew the ribbon to the waistband.

The hardest and most unsure part was cutting the bottom part of the bodice off. Lizzie cut it very generously and told me to cut the bottom bit off. But I didn't know where. So I had Camille try the bodice on, then pinned the waistband over it snugly so it looked like it was gathered. That made it sit just at the right place. Then I took pins and made a line all around the bottom of the bodice, just along where the top of the waistband was. When I took it off, I gathered along that line and then cut off quite a lot off the bottom edge.
What I like about how I did that is it is very straight. Most patterns, just in the spot where there are gathers, go down just a bit, so that it looks straight when you are finished. But making up a pattern, there are usually straight lines, so it sometimes goes up where there are gathers. By doing it this way, I was able to get a pretty straight line.

 The sleeves I shortened from the original pattern and also made it less full, because you want the fullness of the sleeves to match the skirt. 

 For the buttons, I was able to use some really pretty mother-of-pearl ones that belonged to our Great Great Grandmother. Which is pretty neat.