Downton Abbey Inspired: The Lady Grantham Dress

Lady Grantham has two dresses that I really like. The first one is a red dress that looks like it's been hand painted on the bodice. The other one is the cream and black one pictured below:

Here is another view of it. Notice the lacy detail. I just really like the contrast of the stark black against the soft cream:

So I decided to make my own version. Unlike my other dresses that usually take between 5-8 hours to do, this one took about 15 hours.

My challenge was to make something that hinted at the original dress, but didn't look "costume-y." I used the same basic pattern as the other two Lady Mary dresses. I got the idea after seeing Lady Grantham's dress and realizing that I had off-white material (remnants of an unused Ralph Lauren bed sheet) and about a yard and a half of black lace fabric. I actually cut out shapes in the lace that I felt looked like trim. I added patent leather trim to give the whole thing an edge.

I pouffed the sleeves again. If you look closely, the lace doesn't have a finished edge. I did that on purpose, because I just liked the look. I think it looks modern.

In the original, the lace at the bottom sort of creeps up the sides of Lady Grantham's coat, so I hinted at that same "creepidge." This little detail here took me about 2 hours alone and trying to keep it all straight took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

You can see the patent leather in this picture. I sewed the bodice to the skirt and sewed the leather over it. This method is unlike The Sound of Music Curtain Dress in which I had used the belt part to actually drop the waist. I figured that sewing the belt on top of this dress would help with durability as the cream material is rather thin (I actually double-layered the material everywhere but the sleeves) and the leather was very thick. 

I'm not super happy with this side zipper as the leather is kind of bulky, but oh well. I am happy with my Huskvarna Viking sewing machine because it was able to sew through all this thickness with no problems!

The original dress had some lacey details on the sleeves, but I didn't want to overpower the whole thing with lace, so I just added this little detail to the small of the back.

This little charmer took about an hour. This is the only one I did by hand.

A close-up of the back neckline.

Someone point me to the nearest garden party!