Dainties

I had a piece of soft, soft Lycra-filled jersey with some grosgrain ribbon that matched it to a moral, and some pretty lace fabric, and a hankering to use the eyelet setter I'd rediscovered when cleaning out a drawer last week. So instead of buying lingerie for a shower I was going to, I decided to throw out the intimidation that has always kept me from making intimates, and came up with this little nightie - and had so much fun doing so!

The top of a simple dress pattern gave some basic dimensions for the bodice, but I altered the front with a split in order to lace it up and made the back bodice one piece by cutting on the fold, taking up what would have otherwise have been the seam allowance with a few cute pintucks (I've been on a pintuck kick recently) at the center back. The Lycra stuff, which is incredibly stretchy - I think it is actually meant as a swimwear fabric, so it stretches in all directions - was a bit of a pain to work with, bunching and rippling instead of feeding through the machine correctly as I sewed it together with the lace, until I caved and started using Scotch tape to stabilize the fabric where I needed to put seams. That worked well, and it ripped neatly apart where the needle punched it, though I ended up with an inordinate number of little sticky strips stuck to my fingers and clothes by the time I was done. But I like that fabric well enough to make it worth it.

I cut out the skirt (a slightly modified rectangle that I eyeballed for size...you know how much of designing is just educated guesswork?) with a rotary cutter to keep the edges super-clean, and it's so fray-resistant that I didn't need to hem or finish the raw edges at all. I didn't even gather the skirt properly (secret: I hate gathering), but pinned it evenly around the bottom edge of the bodice and then fed the wrinkles in at regular intervals as I stitched the two together. Once that was done, I set my serger to a very short stitch length and trimmed and bound that skirt-bodice seam. The serging contains the edges of the lace well enough that they should be quite comfortable and not itchy.

And then all that was left was to bind the top of the bodice (I used a length of vintage acetate binding that I'd pulled from a grab-bag a friend had sent me from her grandmother's de-stashing) and set the eyelets and put in the ribbon for lacing and shoulder straps. Such a gratifying evening project! I don't think I'm going to switch focus off of the gowns anytime in the foreseeable future, but this was a great excursion into previously-unexplored design and sewing territory.

The antique gold eyelets were leftover from a corset order I filled a couple of years ago. I discovered that you can't actually use this kind of eyelet for real corsets; they're too flimsy to bear the stress for that, but they're perfectly suited for this kind of lacing. (I eventually had to go to a leather supply warehouse to get the strong eyelets and anvil set needed for the corset. That kind is not as fun and easy as this kind, which you do with this nifty special set of pliers.)

(P.S. - Making corsets might seem like it would be scarier than making negligees, but it's not. Making corsets is like building with Legos. They're sturdy, and you follow a diagram to put it together, and everything stays put. Working with lace and Lycra and ribbons, on the other hand...that's more like doing fancy French braids on a wiggly toddler with fine hair.)

The NotWedding Dress Fitting

Friends, it's been a whirlwind over the last few weeks - a fun cyclone of traveling, not sleeping much, and sewing, sewing, sewing. I had the fantastic opportunity to attend the "rehearsal dinner" for the Atlanta NotWedding three weeks ago, and took down with me the then-incomplete gown to do some fitting on Tinika, the gorgeous model who would be wearing it for the event.

Besides looking stunning and being incredibly warm, funny, and down-to-earth,
Tinika is a professional model and is used to people having to be all up in her personal space - 
which is always nice when you're in a tiny bathroom trying to fit a dress skeleton on
someone you just met! We had a blast.

Sarah Esther was in there with us, snapping away with her camera, and so unobtrusive
that I nearly forgot she was even present. That's a great thing in a photographer,
by the way. I highly recommend her.

Tinika had taken careful measurements ahead of time, so there wasn't a lot to be corrected; but as a roommate of mine once said, "The female body is a topographical nightmare" - and there are always in-person adjustments that need to be made, especially for a dress with transparent construction like I was planning. This fine muslin underdress was to be the basis for the overdress that I completed back in Chattanooga over the next couple of weeks, and so I needed it to fit perfectly so that I could make everything else fit to it.

This is the unfinished blouse that goes on top of the underdress; and here is where the fitting proved to be vitally important. Tinika has scoliosis - a curve in her spine that isn't obvious from her measurements, but does impact the symmetry of her back. I was able to alter the blouse so that it wouldn't gape or sit askew when she wears it. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand...I can't let you go without a sneak peek at how the gown turned out. More on this later! Many many thanks to Sarah Esther Photography for the use of these stellar images.

Working on the NotWedding Dress(es), Part Two

Just sticking my head in here for a second to show you all some of the pretty pretty things sitting around my sewing area...and my living room...and...yeah, these projects have taken over the whole house by this point. It's a good thing that I love looking at lace, linen, and silk!

This is a bit of the dress for the Orlando NotWedding - a pewter dupioni sash (with handmade anemones) against a top of ivory lace overlaid on blush satin.

And this is some of the detail on the Atlanta NotWedding flower girl's dress - tiny pintucks on the bodice and a self-fabric applique on each little sleeve.

 I've been doing TONS of French seam work. It makes a lovely finish, but is rather time consuming to do. If you're not familiar with the technique, it basically involves sewing a seam with the raw edges facing OUT (so they show on the outside of the garment), and then trimming the edges very very close to the seam (as shown below), and then turning it inside-out and pressing the seam line and then sewing it again so that all those raw edges are enclosed. Capisce? Don't worry if it doesn't make any sense...it still makes my brain do somersaults every time I do it.

And then there is the fun of dyeing fabrics. This is for the pink sash belonging to the Atlanta dress. Unfortunately, I measured something incorrectly after the test piece, and the whole yardage of what I was going to use turned out rather brighter than I wanted it. I have a backup plan. This will be what I'm doing last minute before I head down to Atlanta on Wednesday.

Clockwise from left: Big pot of dyeing fabric, bottle of Synthrapol, bag of dye activator (soda ash substitute), pot of fiber-reactive dye powder. This is so much fun to do, especially since you have to stir the dyeing fabric for about 45 minutes straight. I watched a lot of music videos. Taking suggestions for the next time I have a dye job.

...so...be on the lookout for the lovely professional photos of the lovely finished projects in just a few days! I'll keep you posted. Have a wonderful week, friends.

Working on the NotWedding Dress, Part One

I'm working happily away this morning, banging my brain against problems like the pleats for the blouse of the dress. I'm not sure what exactly is going to happen with this. The geometric difficulties I knew would happen are in fact happening, so I need to figure a way to either avoid or incorporate them... 

It was somewhere around this point that I realized I'd burned the bagel I'd put under the broiler.
Burned it very badly.

The skirt, however, is coming along nicely. I used a pattern I had on hand as a shortcut for some basic dimensions as I plotted out the various layers.

Aaaaaaaaand...if you ever speculated that the dressmaker's life is like a Vermeer painting...

...I'm going to have to disabuse you of the notion. Um. This is more what it's like at the moment around the carefully scrubbed dining-room table where I'm working on this particular project.

And that's the honest truth coming from yours truly today! Have a great Tuesday, everyone. Make messes. Turn them into nice things. Listen to good music while you're doing it. I'll leave you with what I've had on repeat all morning - a little live magic for your ears.

Pieces

I'm making two little baptismal gowns for two precious children, one in California and one in Texas; they're the same size, and one is in ivory and the other in white, in soft tissue linen. These are such fun! (You can see what the finished product will look like here.)

Headed to The NotWedding, 2012

On my plate for February - making two wedding gowns for actual brides, making plans for a third gown and wedding party-full of outfits for another bride, odds and ends of alterations for local customers, a couple of costumes for my alma mater's production of Aida, aaaaaaaaaaaand...making this.

Yep, I'm headed to The NotWedding (happening March 8 in Atlanta - would love to see you there!), and am so excited to be a part of the fun happenings with other fantastic vendors and once again provide the bridal gown (see last year's here.) The inspiration photo we were sent for the event showed a sleek, dark-haired woman on a deck chair in front of a gigantic, pale coral Asian parasol. She wore a light-colored swimsuit and a modified cloche/bathing cap - the whole scene was fairly minimal and quite early-1900s-influenced. I loved the parasol with its spokes, and the turn-of-the-last-century feel, and decided to incorporate some of that into this design, while keeping a bit of modernity with the low V back and a few details with the buttons and sash that I didn't put in the sketch.

The whole thing will be sewn of my favorite tissue linen (it's such gorgeous, soft, lightweight-but-crisp stuff!) with pintucks and fan-pleats galore. I decided to let you all in on the process this year - so I'll warn you, there may be some publicly expressed angst coming up as I get down to the actual pattern development and construction of the gown. Things might change along the way. I might have to dye the sash five times (oh mercy, I hope not.) I might have to enlist assistance finding the exact buttons I want (so far, the shopping list of attributes in my head includes "square", "fabulous", and "sparkly but muted".) But whatever - it's going to be fun!

...even if I get no sleep during the shortest month of the year in order to get it all done. 

Wedding Dress Alchemy

It appears to be a growing trend for brides to alter/shorten/dye/otherwise change their bridal gown after their wedding day so that they can wear it again for other functions. I've done this before - for a wedding gown I'd created, actually, which got shortened to knee-length and fiber-dyed sage green.

But today's post concerns a wedding gown I didn't make. Hear the tale of the Taming of the Poly Duchess Satin Dress.

The young husband contacted me; he and his wife were moving to Europe, and were paring down their belongings to the bare minimum. She did not have any deep attachment to her wedding gown, and it had had some water damage while being stored since they got married a few years ago. They asked me to see what I could do with it to turn it into a party dress and pretty much gave me free reign on the design aspect.

I told them from the beginning that I wasn't sure if I could do much with it. I've worked a little with dyes before, but always on natural fabrics - which are ever so much easier to dye than synthetics. I knew that this thick polyester satin was going to be unpredictable and perhaps un-dyeable, but since their other option was to give the gown to Goodwill, I went ahead.

First, I cut off several feet of train and a good twenty-four inches off the front hem of the dress, and removed a bajillion layers of tulle from underneath. I left one small layer in for a bit of a swing.

I hemmed it, using a poly/cotton blend thread, and after doing a bit of research, bought my dyes.

Polyester fibers are not like natural fibers at a molecular level, and you can't dye them the same way. I won't go into the whole explanation here, but if you're a geek or a fabric fiend, it IS kind of fascinating (try this article). The more I researched it, the more intimidated I became (because of articles like this one) and also the more determined I was to make it work. As I gathered information, two main pieces of advice kept surfacing - #1. Don't dye polyester. It won't work. #2. If you must dye polyester, use iDye Poly.

So I picked up some iDye Poly in red and violet from my local craft supply place. I wanted to dye the dress a deep wine color, along with a little extra fabric from the train to make into a belt. The plan was to remove the bow from the bodice, move some of the buttons from the back of the dress (they went all the way down the train) and put them where the bow was, and maybe add straps for a nice, simple, little retro swing dress.

It occurred to me that I'd better remove the beaded trim around the collar, because it probably wouldn't take the dye either...which meant ripping it out and then turning the dress inside out to sew the collar back onto the bodice. Not complicated, but tedious and a little nitpicky. (This is the kind of work where you call up a friend and make her come over and have tea and talk to you while you go to town with your seam ripper.)

I washed the dress (gleefully ignoring the "dry clean only" label), which took the rusty water stains right out and ostensibly removed oils and other residue to make the dye job even. Then it was time to dye! I have a cheap soup pot, twice the size it needs to be for any big batch of chili, that has now become my dyeing vat. It was *barely* big enough to hold the dress and the small bit of extra fabric that I threw in with it. I remembered about the extra buttons just in time and tossed some in, worrying a little that they'd stay at the bottom of the pot and melt as I simmered and stirred the dress on my stovetop for an hour.

See how the tulle is dyeing too? I wasn't sure whether to expect that or not. Nice surprise.

It all appeared to be turning a nice reddish plum. When the hour was up, I took it down to our basement where we have a big utility sink and began the rinsing process. It takes FOR. EV. ER. to rinse this stuff out. And I almost lost all the loose buttons down the drain in the process. And I did splash some of the dye ten feet across the room onto one of my roommate's nice white unmentionables, which I ended up dying completely so now she's got nice deep wine-colored unmentionables instead of weird purple-Dalmation-spot ones.

However, as I rinsed the dress, it became patently obvious that not only was the fabric not deep wine colored but actually an alarmingly bright fuchsia, but it was also blotchy. In weird places. There were two spots on the back - at the waist and just under the shoulder blade - that I realized must have been where the groom put his hand as they took pictures together and posed and danced. My pre-wash hadn't been able to get those oils off, and they affected the way the polyester took the dye. There were also random other blotches here and there, noticeable, and not evenly-spread enough to look like impressionistic watercolors. 

Fuchsia. One of the more commonly misspelled colors in the English language.

After careful consideration, I tossed out the ideas of a) creating a lace overlay for the entire dress, b) covering it all with bunchy tulle ruffles, c) re-dyeing it (I had no reason to expect that the dye wouldn't darken/deepen the blotches, too) and d) just telling the couple that the dye ate the dress and burying the poor thing in my trashcan. I hung the dress to dry (it looked worse when it dried completely) and left it for several days while I dealt with other work.

While gathering some materials for another project, I saw small cans of fabric spray-paint and thought, "Well, I've got nothing to lose at this point." I brought home two of them - a bright violet and a deeper purple - and tested them on the extra piece of fabric I'd dyed. Remembering an art technique from my middle school watercolor class, I wet half of the piece of fabric and sprinkled rock salt liberally over it, and then sprayed the paint lightly over the whole thing to see the difference in how the paint worked with the different preparations. Even thought the can says it gives "even application," it most certainly doesn't, but in this case, I was going for MORE blotchiness than I had, so that was all right. After shaking off the salt, letting the fabric dry, and inspecting the result, I decided to go for the wet fabric, with salt, using the violet paint only. I did about three rounds of that on the whole dress, and when I was done, it looked...different. Not quite the watercolor effect I was going for, and still overwhelmingly fuchsia. My roommates took to calling it the Late 80's Barbie Dress, with the electric pink Jackson Pollock thing going on.

So after a few more days of trying not to think about it, I finally went to my fabric scrap bin for inspiration. I had some silky gray ribbon lying next to some gold silk...and the thought struck me. Back to the craft supply store I went, and got a couple of spools of satin cord in shades of gray, and lengths of the same old-gold ribbon in both satin and grosgrain weave.

After lots of cutting and pinning and zigzag topstitching, I had a nice little asymmetrically-cascading garden all over half of the dress. I took the corners of the collar center and folded them open and tacked them in place. I didn't have time to put it on my mannequin or take another photo after I pressed it, because the customer was on his way over to collect it, but you can get the general idea of the finished product! Since it still fits the owner so well, and she looks good in this palette, I'm tickled...fuchsia...with how it turned out.

...But I don't know if I'll ever try to dye polyester again!

p.s. the couple "loved it." No matter how confident I am in my work, that is always a huge relief to hear =).

How A Dress Happens

 It has been a month of hard work. I don't have the official photos yet of this recent custom wedding dress job, but I promised the bride a little mini-documentary on how the process went, so here it is for all of you!

First I gathered supplies - fabrics (silk, lace, lining, interlining, interfacing), pins (several hundred of them), and my design drawing and customer's measurements for reference.

More photos and full description ~>

The Only One Like It In The Whole World

One of the reasons I so enjoy custom sewing is that everything I make is unique. Even when I do several of the same item, say for a bridal party, the custom fit to each person creates enjoyable challenges. Sometimes, to get a dress to look the same on different body types, I actually use very different base templates to generate my patterns. It's a game I play, with no hard and fast rules, to make unique items look like each other.

But often, I have the joy of making something that is really unique - I won't ever make something that looks exactly like it again. In this case, I had an unusual order; to design and make a dress for a beautiful young woman as her Christmas present (from her then-boyfriend! Fellows, take note!)...no inspiration photos or guidelines given, so that I had near-complete creative freedom with it. Yes.

More photos and full description ~>

As Others See Us

My dearest oldest partner-in-crime Emily of Red Leaf Photography (seriously. outstanding. photography. See her professional site, Facebook page, and Etsy shop!) just blogged a post about my sewing studio. It gives me giggles, because often, when I'm in there, all I see are the stacks of fabric and pieces of paper with measurements and the umpteen empty coffee and tea mugs I need to take down to the kitchen and enough thread clippings and pins on the floor to set up a fairy knitting factory for life...but she saw between all that and captured several of the little serene spots in all the creative chaos!

Click on the photo to go see the whole thing, if you'd like. =)

Retrospect

My dear old friend Courtney is visiting, my dear old friend Emily is over too, and we're sitting around talking about what idiots we were in college. I expect when we're all post-middle age we'll sit around talking about what idiots we are now.

And look! A prototype dress I developed (coming out of my fascination with architectural stained glass, Frank Lloyd Wright, and such) and made a few months ago fits Courtney! I want her to live here and be my model.

The bodice is partially pieced and partially appliqued; I'm currently working on a wedding gown design based on this concept, but in shades of white, ivory, and deep champagne (if anyone is interested, I would love to make it for an actual bride rather than my mannequin.)

At the Fire Hall

My "booth" from last Saturday's Spring Market, just before opening. I had a great day, lots of fun talking with people, including the other vendors - no two had the same kind of wares. Looks like it's going to become a regular happening every month or two!

Beautiful Age

My great-grandmother Jean Olive passed away in 2002. She was one hundred and two years old, and had battled cancer (skin and colon) for decades. Even with a body so ravaged, she had a humorous glint in her eyes and was tall and beautiful. I remember asking her a couple of years before she died if she felt as though she were the whole world's big sister - older than almost everyone, still in possession of a very good mind and pretty good senses - and she just laughed at my question. "No," she answered, "But I really am enjoying seeing my great-grandchildren as adults. Not everyone gets to see that."

The dress, before I began dismantling it. A strong breath could reduce sections
of it to powder, but the lace border is still quite strong.

I've been cutting up and framing pieces of an ancient wedding gown that was given to me, and from what I can deduce, it was likely made before my great-grandmother was born. I keep wondering about the woman - or women - who wore it, and what their lives were before and after the day that they lived in this gown.

Lovely stuff. It's heavy and rich still.

Thinking about age and use and what it does to beauty - how it can deepen it even as it erases it - always reminds me of one little moment in the middle of Orwell's 1984.

Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

'She's beautiful,' he murmured.

'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.

'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.

He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. 

I have nothing more to add to that, only, that at the end of whatever I am used for in this life, I want to be still singing.

Sneak Peek for the St. Elmo Spring Market Today!

I'm just about to head over to the St. Elmo Spring Market at the renovated fire hall. My roommate helped me set up my corner and we'll be ready to roll at 10 am when the doors open. I'm debuting several items that I'm very excited about (including a Frank Lloyd Wright dress that I've had on the back burner for FOREVAH), some saucy new big pillows, and a couple of little baby girl dresses, like this one. We'd love to see you there today - the market goes from 10 am to 6 pm and there are all kinds of other amazing vendors (and free lemonade...and free wine and music in the afternoon.)

Drawing

The past several weeks have seen very little finished, and quite a bit in process. It can be royally discouraging when supplier after supplier has none of the particular fabric you need, or the button you've been searching for; when prospective wedding-gown clients decide they'd rather go with a mass-produced dress; when, for all the work you're doing, there's nothing fresh to photograph and nothing new to go up in the shop. Weeks of alterations and hemming.

But these weeks are also necessary; ideas take time to grow, and just being in fabric, fixing old zippers, adjusting straps, and making buttonholes gives the time and space for new thoughts to form while my hands do familiar work.

I stretched out in a chum's yard a couple of days ago, while she planted herbs in long boxes. New, dark spring grass dampened my shirt and chilled my tummy as I listened to my dear friends talking. Pen and notebook in hand, I began drawing ideas out of the ground.

photography by photolodico