Finished wings, sewn dress

Not a lot of updating recently, but there has been significant progress. The wings are fully painted, their color is matching now, and all that is left is to attach fabric to the base to hide the sockets.

I buckled down this weekend and sewed the dress pretty much all in one go, which took probably about 8 hours. A lot of pinning and eyeballing things later, a finished garment appeared. I ended up sewing the skirt and the top separately, and then attaching the top to the skirt, creating gathers along the hem line. Way more complicated than it needed to be, but that's how I roll.

Turned out not too shabby, although somehow the bottom gathers of the top all sort of pull towards the front, and despite ripping out the seam multiple times and repositioning the gathers, still did the same thing. Guess I can't fix that problem, oh well.

One thing I really need to do in the future is pattern before I start sewing, it will definitely make my life easier and the construction go faster. I also need to learn how to properly put in a zipper, because they are the bane of my existence. Most of the time I was sewing was putting in a seam, looking at it, tearing it out, and redoing it. Correcting mistakes probably took at up at least an hour or two of my time.

After the dress was done, I figured out where to put the slits for the wing sockets, and cut those out and sewed down the edges. I test fit the harness under the dress, and luckily I don't have to adjust anything. The harness is a bit bulkier under the dress then I wanted, but I'll live with it. As you can see in the top right, from the front, you can't see anything of the harness, and that is the most important part. The harness does pull the back of the dress away from my neck, but nothing too funky.

Last night I started painting the dress. It's going to take awhile, and unfortunately I can't fit the finished dress over my dress form. The shoulders of the dress form are just slightly too large for it to fit without ripping a seam. At least for the front I'm painting on the form, but I'll take it down and put cardboard into it to give it some rigidity while I'm painting and paint the rest of it that way. I also have to lighten up the paint job on the front, the mask is appreciably lighter than the dress at the moment.

Luckily the dress is easy to paint, highlight the folds, lowlight the creases. Unluckily, there is a lot of dress, and a lot of fabric, approximately 4 yards worth. Now to see if I have enough paint or not.