Confession time, I'm going to just put this out there...
I didn't want to do the foundations revealed competition.
There, I said it. I didn't get the hype. Why would someone want to take their beautiful creation that they put their blood, sweat, and dozens of hours into for others to judge and possibly put down. There are other who could do it if they wanted, but with each dress I make a little piece of my soul goes into it. They're my babies and I want to be a total helicopter dress parent. But then the guest judge was announced on the Foundations Revealed Website, and it was none other than the woman who made me fall in love with living history. Ruth Goodman who had stolen my heart in her tv series, when I heard her historical nerding out over white washing walls, chasing around sheep, and helping to harness a draft horse.
So for Ruth Goodman, I decided to enter. Even just the chance that she might see my entry was exciting. Plus the majority of previous years entries seemed to be corsets in some form, but Ruth would appreciate a beautifully researched historical outfit.
And thus began the journey of the wool travel dress.Which is ironic as the theme for this year was once 5upon a time, and my piece of literature was The Road Less Traveled by Robert Frost. And for Ruth, my dress had to be perfect. I had a pattern taken from a drawing in a French Magazine from , and had to be converted from centimeters to inches. The fabric was a lovely wool suiting found at resale store and cost a mere $2.50.
Unfortunately though, there was only three yards of the lovely brown goodness so there needed to be some smart Victorian resourcefulness, one might even say industrious (see what I did there). So knowing that the jacket for the bodice would cover up the half top of the skirt. And that got the wheels turning as I remembered something that Liz Clark mentioned once about how to save fabric when making flounced skirts,
So I cut the skirt panels just wde and long enough to reach halfway up the skirt.
After cutting the bottom half of the skirt out of brown, I measured out the top of the skirt pieces in white and sewed the brown skirt bottoms to the white skirt tops. Each piece was sewn individually
before the panels were sewn together. 
The tricky part was making sure that the white matched up with the white, and the brown matched up with the brown perfectly
A little gathering magic, a little ironing and voila, the wool underskirt was done.
This part took maybe two hours and was a lot of fun to play around with. And somehow in its own way I think the white against the brown is quite striking but sadly you and I may be the only ones who get to see it. Oh well, the end product will still be beautiful in its own right.
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