The Woman in the Purple Dress

 I already told you, that after a some discussion and deliberation the museum (which is the National Galery) asked me to reproduce a dress from two of their paintings. Lats week I showed you one of those, which was a medeival dress, this week I am bringing you the one that was a much bigger task, The Woman in the Purple Dress. The painting always had ambivalent reactions, many hailed it as the "Hungarian Mona Lisa", others criticized it for several reasons, one of those that it was painted in a studio (not outside). The modell is the painter's wife, who was pregnant at the time, and during the modeling she felt increasingly uncomfortable, not in the least, because the dress she made for herself was getting increasingly thight.

From the first moment we talked about this dress I set out to get just the perfect shade of purple taffeta, which was not an easy feat, as even though one can find many pictures of the painting on the Internet, all shows a slightly different shade of purple. 
I found three possible choice online, the museum people choose one, however, by the time all the paperwork went through and the advance payment arrived, the store did not had enough of it. I needed to start over. By that time the deadline was getting alarmingly close, aside of the color and the price, I had to consider the shipping time as well. I found one possibility in Poland and an other within the country, and the museum people choose the polish one. Cool, they are paying and I wanted them to be absolutely satisfied, so I ordered the polish one. 

By that time I had all the underwear done (in fact I had those done before the advance payment arived, because... well let's just talk about the dress, and not get into deadlines, because no matter how carefully I am trying to set them in my written offer, at the end the advance payment arrives when it is, and the deadline is set at what it is set, and there is always a rush....Anyhow...), and worked on the medeival dress when the package arrived from Poland. And when I opened it, I was about to cry. 

Not only is the fact that they are not selling fabric in 1 meter units but only 0,5 meters units, and turns out the price is double, which would still have been the lesser problem, but half of what I needed arrived (yes, the info is on the page, but pretty well hidden, and I was happy finding any purple taffeta, and was not paying enough attention). However, the fact that the color is "shot" or "changeable" wich means it is woven in a way where the warp threads as one color (purple) and the weft is anouther one, in this case red. Which resulted in a fabric that, loking at it from one way looked gorgeous, just the right shade of purple, but from every other was it was RED. 

While I was gaping to that fabric and trying to convince myself, that I can make it work, and the other half CAN make it in time, my messanger flashed. 

I told you, how I was actively searching for the right shade of taffeta for months, and that search inculed badgering the salespersons in every store of the I Love Textile chain for that purple taffeta. (You know, the chain that sells factory rejects, leftovers and whatnot at a fairly affordable price). By now their sales persons know me (and my reenactor friends), they know what we are looking for. So the blink on my messanger was the guy, Csaba from one of these stores, saying "Hey, I got some puple taffeta, do you still need it?" YESS! Yes, yes! I was in the store in no time, bought a bunch of it, and then collected what else purple fabric I found at home (you can see them in THIS post) and run up to the museum asking the museum people to go, check the fabrics against the painting and choose, which one I should use. They did see that the polish one would not work and chose the one that came in the last minute with the help of the I Love Textile store. 

I finally had all the fabric I needed, the underwear was done, I could set out sewing. The purple taffeta was a bit thinner than I would have preferred, but I underlined it with a fabric that was kind of stiff but not thightly woven. (The same way I lined my blue and silver bustle dress). That meant a ton of basting. 

I sewed about 30 meters of lace decoration on the skirt, and the hem was done with a wide bias strip. 

Once again by the time I got to sewing the deadline was really thight, so not much time to take pictures, but we managed to sneak in a few, when it was finished. 

The skirt actually has a train, but also there are strings and rings inside (just like on my bustle dress), so it can be "bustled up" (pulled up inside), so it does not gets dragged through the floor. 

Also an overskirt is made, though you cannot see clearly on the picture, just how it is made on the sitter's dress, but generally they wore such a thing.

And then I set out to make the jacket. I thought, my job will be easy, as last year I already managed to make a pattern that I was satisfied with, I just get out the mock up and the pattern I made for my bustle dress fit it onto the size M/38 dressform a friend loaned to me... but as much as I was searching for it, I could not find it. I dug through about 9 years worth of sewing patterns, mock up and modified patterns to no avail. I needed a quick solution. I turned to Truly Victorian patterns, though they did not have exactly the style I had in mind, they had one I could work with.

I only used this as a starting point, took of the ruffled peplum from the back and added peplum-y bits to the bottom all around, so after a couple of mock-ups it started to look like my bodice. 

Once again, my innate need to have the inside finished properly got the better of me, and I neded up sewing a lot by hand tacking down edges, sewing in boning cases, and adding the ruffled lace to the neck and sleeves by hand and other stuff. 

And the dress was done.

The last task was to make the sleeve-ruffles, that are buttoned inside the sleeve, so they can be taken out if they needed to laundered. 

When it was all done and finished, I walked over to the furniture store nearby, because they sell the metal hangers with the clips that has springs in them, they are the ones strong enough, and picked up dress-bags, packed up the dresses and took them to the museum. 

Spent some time with the museum-girls to show them each piece, and helped to dress one of them, so they know in just what order to put the pieces on. When she was fully dressed, she wanted t run down to the painting at once, to take pictures, so we did. 

It was a lot of work, and rather complicated, but at the end I was proud of the finished piece.

I had help from a few people, from Katalin, who lent me the dressmaker doll, Csabe Legyesi from I Love Textile who managed to procure just the right shade of taffeta in the last minute, Gizus, who helped me to get the pattern, Christopher who picked up packages for me (with the lace, the boning and other accessories), Norbert who drove me to pick up the dressform, and kept cheering me on, even when I was crying about the wrong shade or my hurting hands, and set up the place to photograph the pieces at 2 AM.