I think the thing that has stood out to me the most whilst sewing Bunny’s Prom dress – is how much work goes into the early stages of the construction. The hidden ‘guts’ of the gown that does all the heavy lifting and make the external shine has taken the majority of my time. I knew this going in and I know this is incredibly necessary, yet it’s still really confronting how much work needs to go into the underlayers. Bunny wants her skirt to have a good amount of volume, partly because she just loves that silhouette, but also because this is necessary to allow the details of the embroidered tulle outerlayer to shine. Now that i’ve finished the cupped corset bodice, I’ve been sewing a voluminous tulle petticoat crinoline in order to do this, and had to make a lot of little decisions along the way to make sure that I got it right.
A crinoline is essentially a structured petticoat that would sit under a petticoat in traditional clothing to hold the skirt away from the body and achieve the desired shape. Historically these have been made lots of ways, but I think most people associate them with hoops, which isn’t always the case. Bunny quite definitely did not want any kind of hoop under her gown, and wanted a soft feeling when she sits. Which works for me, as I did not want to sew hoops, and honestly I haven’t seen many examples of modern crinolines that include hoops.
The skirt of her gown essentially requires four layers. The outermost layer being the embroidered tulle, the second layer being the sage green satin that is the base of the gown skirt, the third layer is the structural support layer aka the crinoline, and the last layer is the lining that sits against her skin. After a lot of research and planning I decided to combine the lining and crinoline petticoat into one to simplify things. My sewing philosophy has always been and will always be: simplify, simplify, simplify.
I had originally drafted a half circle skirt for the lining, and decided this was still a good base to work from. I purchased dress net fabric – which is essentially a very stiff tulle for creating structured underskirts. I’ve seen this called many things, and have also seen it advertised as crinoline fabric if you’re looking for it yourself. Dress net or crinoline fabric, is incredibly stiff and stands up on it’s own, so I did not want to make the entire crinoline petticoat out of this.
What I decided to do was to cut a half circle lining and a half circle out of the dress net and then sew the two together. The reason for this was simple. The dress net will on it’s own, stand out slightly from the body due to it’s structure, the lining however, has a tendency to cling to the body. When you are wearing many layers of fabric anything that clings is very uncomfortable, so I wanted to make sure this didn’t happen to Bunny.
By combining the lining and crinoline I was essentially forcing the lining to sit away from the body as the two fabrics will act as one. To achieve this i cut the three panels of the half circle from the lining and the dress net, then carefully pinned each panel together. I sewed from the waist down to the hem in a number of locations across the waist, always radiating from waist to hem. Once the panels were joined well i sewed the half circle petticoat together treating the lining as the ‘right side’ of the garment to ensure no dress net would touch her body. I hope it’s easy to see in these photos how the dress net natural sits away from the body and creates volume.
Once this base was complete in order to include additional volume I purchased 10m of tulle in the same sage colour as the lining. I cut the tulle into strips and four different widths so that i could sew them at different levels up the skirt hem to lay on of each other and create volume at the hemline – which is where we want most of the volume in this dress.
My ruffler foot was essential to this process and I was so glad that I took the time to purchase and test it early on as it saved me so much time. I joined all the pieces of tulle that made up each of the four layers, so that i had four long strips of tulle. I then simply fed each one through my ruffler foot and once they were gathered I sewed them directly onto the petticoat. There are a lot of ways of using tulle for volume in a petticoat, but this method was preferred by me as it allowed me to add layers of volume incrementally. I also like that it resulted in a very pretty underlayer hem that pokes out when you walk.
If you would like more details of the process and method for constructing this voluminous petticoat, I’ve got a video up on Youtube now that will take you through everything I did.
As a last note I will say that the weight of the gown itself will compress any petticoat crinoline that is underneath it somewhat, so i have found that it is necessary to make the petticoat more voluminous than you wish the final garment to be. That way when the gown and petticoat are combined the weight of the gown will somewhat compress the volume of the petticoat, but the petticoat will still have enough structure left to hold the skirt in the appropriate position.
Now that voluminous tulle petticoat crinoline is complete and I’ve created the volume that Bunny wants for her skirt, I can now move on to making the final skirt! I really hope you are enjoying following along with this process. I’m certainly learning a lot and enjoying myself! As always if you have any questions or tips let me know in the comments.
