 Good morning. I'm going to set up the dress form for the Isabella McTavish Rose Your Wedding dress and I'm going to do it here in my rooms at the historic Colonial Williamsburg and it will just be kind of fun to have an opportunity to set up in a quite lovely setting and capture it on film. The reason I've brought my own dress form all this way and gone to a great deal of them. Oh, uncertainty and indecision and pernickliness about finding a suitable suitcase to pack a dress form in. It's because this dress form has been cut down and then padded up each in judicious areas for the historical silhouette for 18th century so that then the stays that have been made to fit Georgia Gough the model who we made the dress on and it fits her perfectly. We basically create that foundation for the dress to look to look right and hang right and fit right in the bodice before display and I'm here in America with several talks where the dress is on display and talked about and a bit of a dressing demonstration in some cases as I did the other night so impromptu at the Keeler Tavern Museum in Connecticut. So having a dress form I'm familiar with and know exactly what its shape and size is nothing really is quite the same as a custom fit and it's the same with the clothing. Another factor is actually set up time when you're traveling if you arrive at some place that you've only got half an hour or well I was very very lucky the other night at Keeler Tavern Museum where I arrived and actually had about three hours to settle in, get set up, get changed, have a bite to eat, sit down with a cup of tea, chat with my hostesses. Set up time is a key feature and when I travel to museums to speak sometimes I have very little time to set up and being familiar with the dress form, yes a museum can often provide a dress form that's already assembled but getting a good fit on a dress form body that hasn't already been shaped takes some time and another factor is that you have to put the stays on onto the dress form and these stays are fortunately they're just back lacing but lacing stays takes time to get them on, get them situated, get them fitted and then to lace them up. Perhaps have a little bit less freedom in how to do that than you would on a human body because human body changes every day and yes you do things a little differently each time whereas the dress form is what it is and you've got to get it so that the dress form fits properly and the dress and is laced up tightly enough so that then the dress will sit smoothly around it. So with this having the dress and being able to take the dress form body on and off the stand put it all away in a suitcase piece of lacing doesn't have to be done and undone over and over again in a hurry. Now as on a human body it appears that this is actually loosened up a little bit and could be. The undress form is the width of the shoulders so I get them up there as there's my hands as the gown is going to stay put and I use some headed pins. There's probably not very kind or long-term fabric of the dress but in essence to be absolutely honest for a few minutes until I get the rest done the gown is hanging on the back by those pins and the excess the back panel it doesn't stick out a little bit now. To finish this dress then the weight will be more evenly distributed and actually the weight will sit on mostly on top of the bum pad which is a skirt support and that's exactly what it's designed to help do is support the weight of the gown and once that happens then generally the back of the shoulders kind of rise up and sit much more lightly over the dress form and so that the whole gown is not in fact hanging from the top but it is being supported a bit more evenly through the waist but until that all happens it is true that quite a lot of weight try to do what gravity does and fall to the ground right. I've got a mixture of pins here I use silk pins that were the red head so they don't show much okay the shift sleeves just to eliminate so they're not adding bulk now are we losing light are we okay so this gown quite crucially does have lacing strips to take pressure off the fabric front otherwise that again that front edge would be taking a lot of kind of weight of holding down onto the body. Being quite insensitive so pressing onto her body should be pulling the ending in first with press to pull this lace touch you must have been quite shocked when I first did that and then I felt like doing that to a human being is something she took away. Actually because I tightened the lace at the stays the lacing in the back just a bit I've actually got just a little bit more overlap of the tension over that the front edges of the gown which often to be honest it's a pretty close call as to whether that's going to meet since we have there but for the sake of demonstration and talks I think sometimes I'm going to just leave that rest in it looks like it's all put in the fastened unless you get up close and you realize no one is left loose because I do want to be able to reference the lacing. Now usually towards the end of the talk we're doing the Q&A session Q&A session people ask what I think that how does it close how does it stay on I would like if I wanted to put this to you. This is where I'm going to work and a bit of cut scene if you're not back and forth. I do like to be able to show the oddest fronts with a cut on the straight of the brain it does require keeping this tight and set up and down up and down it'd be very very tempting for a smooth fit with power because you'd have a lost little girth there on the dress board quite a few days to get smooth that I've overlapped more but then you preset creating more of a diagonal and it doesn't really I don't think honour the original dress and it's striking appearance of the set. So there we have it, here's the final touch.