Akari's Wedding Dress

It's been a while since I worked on the Akari dress, so I tried to make a little progress over the long weekend. I kept going back and forth on how the back is going to come together, so I started with the front.

After re-reading my notes on the Grace Kelly dress, that this is supposed to be an R&D project for, I ended up coming up with a four layer test plan. The four layers will actually be two layers. One, an outer layer made up of four-ply silk underlined with a fabric to be named later. Two, an inner layer made up of two layers of cotton.

The outer layer will have a phony closure made up to resemble the drawing of Akari in the manga. The inner layer will have a separating zipper to reflect, more or less, the underbodice unit of the Grace Kelly dress.

For the center back, I started working over the pattern pieces to account for the phony closure. That part will be 2" wide, centered on the center back. To modify the pattern pieces, I had to draw in the closure. On both the right and left center back pieces, I drew lines parallel to the center back line, 1" over in each direction.

On the left side, this should become two pieces as noted above. There's a good chance of this become several pieces, so the "closure" becomes a separate flap. The right side will be extended in width, but I'm not sure if this will make it look more like it's two sides, buttoning up as-if it were a real closure or screw it up because it will look like things don't line up. I need to draw it out on paper some more.

Okay, I thought about it again and that flap idea was wrong. The overlap version is the correct one.