Packing Gown Skirt Mock Up

I've been working on the skirt mock up for the packing gown for the last week or so now, and I've started to make some really good progress. I've been trying to figure out how to work the pleats and have gone through a lot of different types and trials.

This was my second attempt at getting the pleats right.

As you can see here it looks pretty good on the top, but the bottom half of the skirt isn't as full as it needs to be. So I took all of those pleats out and tried again but this time made them smaller.

This is what I have for the underskirt right now. The plan is to put ruffles along the whole under skirt, but for right now this is all I have and it's working for the time being.

Since my room is so small I have to spread everything out on my bed. Here's some of the reference photo's I've been using.

I recently bought "Dressing a Galaxy" by Trisha Biggar, and it's an amazing book! Unfortunately it only has two pictures of the packing gown in it. But I've still found it really helpful in making this costume so far.

For my next attempt at the skirt I needed more material so I found some old sheets and have been using that. I made the pleats smaller and that did help, but it still wasn't looking quite right. I needed the pleats to be even smaller, but I didn't know how to do that. I went and looked through my reference photo's to try and get an idea of what to try next.

I decided to test out an idea I had after I noticed in this picture that the skirt seemed to be sewn to the under bodice. It doesn't look like it's pleated at this part but instead just gathered and the waistband underneath seems to have the pleats pinned into place.

So I went back to my previous fabric to test it out and it worked! I gathered it and pinned it onto the sewing form before adding the waistband.

I guess you could call it a mock, mock waistband. It didn't look the nicest but it seemed to be working.

 I went back to the sheets and gathered it. The sheet's were approximately 2.5 yards long and that just barely made it around. So I think I'm going to have to add another yard to yard and a half because the back isn't as full as it should be.

Please excuse the mess. Like I said before, my room is small and everything goes onto my bed or floor when I'm sewing.

So that's pretty much where I'm at right now. I attempted to get the little bustle the skirt has by creating a bustle pad, but it ended up being too big and more like and 1870's skirt than Padme's packing gown. So I'm going to be trying some other methods next.