Brown Apron Dress

ignore the blue hemline; it hangs correctly
on me, just not on a hanger

With a Viking-themed event coming up in October, I wanted to be sure my Viking wardrobe was ready to go. I realized, though, that the various pieces of my wardrobe weren't all as interchangeable as I thought - I could make ONE outfit out of the pieces I had, and that was it!  I needed a new under dress and a new apron dress.  I decided to work on the second problem first - because I already had the fabric for it.

The fabric is a chocolate brown linen/cotton blend,  harvested from the skirt of a costume that I made back in 2011.  It's got a lovely drape and feels really nice.  I really wanted it to be full-length, but I didn't quite have enough fabric.  As it is it comes down to about mid-calf.  The pattern I used is the same as this one (though I made myself a paper pattern so I don't have to do the math every time).

it's straight, trust me.  It's laying weird in this picture. And I suck at photography.  

The seams are decorated in a 2-color double herringbone stitch.  The band of embroidery across the top of the dress is a double herringbone stitch, too, but the second color is much narrower than the first, and a third color accents the Xs between the stitches.  The entire band is surrounded by a border of teal embroidery floss couched in a spiral with green.  There was supposed to be a pair of ravens capping this off in the front, but my embroidery skills are no longer up to par - I tried three times and couldn't get it right. I have a lot of practice to do.  For now, I am raven-less.

The straps are loop straps, similar to what I did on my orange apron dress. It's just a long tube of fabric, folded in half and hand-sewn together leaving a loop at the end for the brooch to go through.  I really love the look of this style of strap, and the ease of wear. They do have to be exactly the right length, though - they're not as forgiving as plain straps, and not adjustable at all. (Are they period?  Maybe.  We've found loops constructed in this way on brooches that seem to suggest that there were loops on apron dresses - but then, our evidence for these apron dresses is sketchy at best, and only based on small fragments of garments, so the whole "apron dress" idea is kind of made up anyway).

I had every intention of timing all of this work - especially the embroidery - to see how it stacks up against my estimate - but I completely forgot at first.  I can tell you I watched about two dozen episodes of Forensic Files and all of the new Dark Crystal series (and the original movie) while I worked, but I also went way, way past that.  All told, the dress took me about 3 hours (I actually timed that), and I believe the embroidery and hand-sewing on this dress took about 30 hours. My estimate was 6!  How long does embroidery take, anyway??  I guess now I know a little bit better: it takes forever.

So there's one new apron dress to wear to Valkyrfelt in October.  I'm very pleased with it.  I really love the colors in the embroidery, and I love the way the dress fits and the fabric feels.  In the pictures here it's shown with the blue linen Eura dress that I made in  2015.  (I know the hemline looks wonky in the first picture - it's not.  It hangs perfectly straight on me, just not on a hanger!)

So What's Next? 

I have a dress to dye!  Actually, it's already done.  I'll post about that in the next couple of days.