Ever After Gold Court Dress

Over all, I'm happy with the way the dress looks. However, there are some things I need to change on it. The bodice is too long and too loose. I need to add just a thin couple of pieces of boning to the back closure. Really, that's it.

This dress was a learning experience but not in the normal sense of the phrase. I bought nearly all the material to make this dress five plus years ago. I kept putting the dress off for another time. What shocked me now when I got all the material together is how my perception on what an appropriate fabric is has completely changed. The yellow damask I might still use but not the white jacquard. It was heavy drapery/light weight upholstery grade fabric. It doesn't move but does have enough stiffness on it's own that it was useful in the bodice area.

The gauntlets would never be made of panne velvet now. I would have gone with silk velvet. The sleeves would never be poly organza - silk organza only. My choice of fabric and what I look at to buy is completely different now. It was odd to work with the older materials and see what I used to think was perfectly fine.

The colors were perfect in each of the materials, however, and that's probably what my main focus was. The dress itself is great for Renn Faire and that's probably where I'll end up wearing it.

The other learning experience with this dress was turning my historical brain off so I could match it to the movie gown. Thanks to the Ever After costumes website run by a dear friend, I was able to do a lot of research on the gown I wanted to recreate pretty easily. The gown in Ever After laces up the back and it's just one gown - not an undergown with a front snapping overgown. This made the dress WAY more complicated that really was necessary. I had to make the front flaps to the bodice over a bodice front with a faux chemise front. It meant a lot of very interesting sewing and making sure everything got placed correctly. Seriously, Hollywood? Period is WAY easier.

EDIT:: This painting probably inspired the original movie dress.

You can easily see the color scheme and some of the lines in the portrait dress recreated in the movie dress. Maybe I should make a historically accurate portrait dress based off of this to show the differences?