Dress Up Challenge 2011 - Peter Paul Rubens

I created this for the Dress Up Challenge 2011.  This month our inspiration was the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens.  Rubens created lush paintings of ladies who didn't watch their waistlines.  And judging from the number of ruffs ladies in his paintings are wearing, the ladies weren't worried about comfort either!  The ruff was a very fussy collar-type accessory containing innumerable highly-starched loops.  They took a LOT of fabric to create!  And they could not have been comfortable.  I felt that my dress just had to contain a neck ruff.

That ruff took me hours to create!  I first tried to create it out of paper, but I found out very quickly that paper would not be the way to go with such a small ruff.  So I settled for ribbon and I didn't cut a length - I just started looping it and left the ribbon on the roll, not cutting until I was done.  I probably used about half of the ribbon roll!  The rest of the dress was easy by comparison.  I decided to use Juliet's fantastic dahlia fold tutorial to dress up the skirt.