I have returned!

Sorry for the lack of updates folks!  I've been away in Toronto visiting my sister and doing various geeky activities such as: Medieval Times, the Royal Ontario museum, The Ontario Science center and Anime North!  But I am back now and I do have pictures of progress on my grad piece.

So let's get down to business.

I started by cutting out my fabrics as usual and in the case of the skirt and petticoat fabrics, letting them hang over night to let the areas that are cut on the bias do what they will. If you don't do this, your bias cut areas will stretch out weirdly and your hem will be a wonky mess.

 In the end, one side of the front of the skirt did in fact stretch out to be about 2 inches longer then the other, but thankfully that was before I had sewed it all together and so it was easily fixed when I hemmed the bottom.  I'll show more pictures of that later, lets get on to the coat.

Next up, I cut out the lining for my coat and the coat itself.  This is where I ended up inhaling more fiber dust then I would ever like.  The coat is triple velvet and it sheds like a cat in spring.

 You can't iron triple velvet.I'm not sure if it makes the fibers fall out, melts the fabric or just crushes the pile of the fabric (pile = the fuzzy texture) but I wasn't going to risk it. So instead of fusing my interfacing to my fabric like I normally would, I hand basted sew-in fusible to every piece. I did find out that velvet steams really well, so at least I could get the wrinkles out if/when they happened.
Here are all the outer pieces of the coat laied out.

And a close up.

Here is the front of my lining on the Judy. The pieces flopped over the top are the Center front and facing linings for the coat which will be sewn to the rest of it later.

The back of my coat lining. You'll notice that the center back is shorter then the rest, this is because the jacket back will be made from cartridge pleats and will need no lining.  (You can also just see the nearly finished skirt in the background behind the lining).

That is all for now! I promise more pictures later.