Week 7 Review

Well now this week has been exceptionally successful and I'm feeling extra confident about the project now. Tuesday's fitting was a huge success and everything fitted beautifully with the odd bits in need of a couple of cms decrease which I was expecting anyway. Chris was really pleased with how the costume has come along. Obviously being a toile fitting it is still very much a blank canvas, but he was happy with the cut, the style, lengths and fits, and I had some research to show him which was more than exciting. I asked Kelly if she would assist me alongside Graham in the fitting. I thought this would be wise as we scheduled with Chris to fit Eddie ourselves at his house later that evening so that the fitting wouldn't interfere with Eddie being at school. This meant that any fit/design adjustments that were made to my costume could be logged and transferred to the fitting for Kelly's.
After the fitting both Kelly and me decided that it was highly necessary to purchase our top fabrics ASAP. Graham recommended that we source a box fabric for the frock coat. We visited the archive and really liked the samples from H.E Box Ltd in Weymouth. I gave them a call to make sure they had the samples available and had plenty of it, to which they said they did,so Kelly and myself set out on a brief road trip to Weymouth. The manager of the store was so helpful and within the half hour of being there we learned an awful lot about the fabric we would soon be working with. The Melton fabric that we chose is a very popular fabric for Town Crier costumes so already that was really good to know. The fabric is obviously a great success for this particular area so at least we can be sure we have made the right decision about that. The fabric is also a lot wider than average which is also good as my patterns in particular are quite large and I need to accommodate for all of the pleats. The one thing we have to be extra careful with when cutting the fabric is the direction of the grain. Very much like Velvet the fabric lies smoothly in only one direction and can be noticeable to the eye if laying incorrectly. This is a fabric I have never worked with before so it will be interesting to see how well/easily I can work with it, and at nearly £30 p/mt I really am going to have to take extra care when cutting it. Kelly and I left the store with 6.5mts of deep red Melton and 3.5 mts of off white moleskin for the breeches. The rest of the week was then spent altering our pattern pieces after the toile fitting, and cutting our top fabric...SUCCESS!!