Back on the Blog, and what I learned by sewing my own wedding dress

When last I blogged I had plans to sew every day.  Since almost a year has passed since then it may seem as if I must not have met that goal.  Truth is, I didn't sew EVERY day, but pretty close to it for several months, if not sewing then definitely knitting.  I just didn't blog any of it.  At first because I was making things to give people for Christmas and didn't want to ruin the surprise for anyone by putting it on my blog.  Then, because my computer died.  And then the camera died.  

Plus, I am lazy.  I'll blog if it's easy, but not if it isn't.  Now it is easy again because I got a Macbook which I love more than pretty much anything else I've ever owned, and even though we still haven't replaced the digital camera I figured out how to use the PhotoBooth feature to make images that are plenty good enough for blogging with.

Since then a lot of things have happened, the main thing being that I got married.  I sewed my own wedding dress from Vintage Vogue pattern V2903.  I had these great plans to get it 

all done early and avoid last minute stress, which of course didn't happen at all and I was literally hemming that thing at 2 AM on the morning of the wedding.  

I didn't mind though, I'm pretty much at peace with my procrastination habit and I figure that as long as things that have to get done actually do get done it doesn't matter so much when.

the main drawback was the annoyance of having every single person I encountered ask me every single day during the two weeks before the wedding, "how's the dress coming?" and then react with extreme abject horror when the answer was inevitably oh I haven't started yet but I will soon, don't worry! 

Seriously, people looked at me like I said I had killed a puppy or something and everyone else was 500 times more concerned about it on my behalf than I was.  Including people I hardly even know: the hipster dude who cuts fabric at my fave store, the little old lady who struck up a conversation with me at the bus stop, waitresses at the rehearsal dinner restaurant, everyone.

I will admit to feeling that if I had given myself more time I might have been able to make it into a more flattering fit, but everyone I've mentioned that to says I'm crazy and it looked great so whatever.

I learned a LOT by making the dress myself.  Technically I didn't do it all on my own; my friend Carrie who is a dressmaker and has been sewing for longer than I've been alive helped me out, and having someone actually show me how to do things that before I'd only ever taught myself from books or websites made a huge difference.  Here are the things I learned for the first time, or learned how to do a whole lot better than I knew before:

• Making and fitting a muslin: before I'd been too lazy to do this, but it wasn't hard at all and didn't take as long as I feared.  I still won't be likely to make muslins all that often, but now I won't avoid doing it if it's a project that really calls for it.
• Installing an invisible zipper: this is one of those things I had always thought would be difficult but it was so super easy that I only want to do invisible zippers in pretty much everything from now on!
• Using bias tape to finish the arm opening: I wanted to make the dress without the sleeves, and wouldn't have known how to make this work without help.  Carrie showed me how to finish the raw edges with bias tape, which before I had only ever used as a decorative trim, not as a way to smoothly and invisibly finish a raw edge.
• Clipping curves: this one feels so dumb and simple when I think about it now, but I never truly understood what the instructions meant when they said to do this!  now I do, which is great because I tend to like designs with princess seams or other curved lines and it is much less challenging for me now to make these things work for me

Besides learning this stuff, working with Carrie helped me get a better sense of what parts of a project to spend lots of time on and what's safe to let go of.  For example I normally like to have very nice finished seams on the inside of my garments, french seams usually, but given the time constraints and the fact that I'm unlikely to wear this dress more than the one time it was nice to be able to give myself permission to just not worry about that.

Also, turns out I've gotten much better at sewing in general and I totally don't need to use as many pins as I have been.  Things do come together just fine without all the overthinking and fretting I'm usually in the habit of doing.

Overall, it was a great experience to have, and I am so very proud to have sewn my own wedding dress.  It gave me a great deal of confidence that I'll take with me when doing other, much less momentous sewing projects.  I'm at the point now where I pretty much sew an outfit for myself for every special occasion, whether it's formal or casual, a once in a lifetime event or just a day trip or regular old garden party or holiday celebration.  I intend to post about this much more often now and share my crafting fun with whoever is interested enough to check in on this blog.  Enjoy!

Not a good sewing night

Last night I didn't have any extra work to do, and I got done with the work I did have earlier than expected, and there was nothing good on TV, so it was a good time to get some sewing done. Too bad I couldn't get anything to go quite right.

First of all, I've been working on a Vintage Vogue pattern for a dress with a sort of weirdly shaped neckline, that forms into an almost sort of triangular opening in the front, with basically 3 points. I can't find an image of it online and I don't have it handy to scan, but it looks a little like this pattern, but without the gathers on either side and straight lines, not curved. (And honestly, I guess I should be happy that it's not more like this picture... this looks even harder!) It also has an option for a collar attached to it, and I wanted to make that version since it seemed a bit more casual looking to me, and I had visions of wearing this to some outdoor singing gigs with my red cowgirl boots and red lipstick, or to summer daytime parties with footless tights (even summer is cold enough for tights here in SF) and red ballet flats.

I'm making this out of black eyelet, which I love, but that caused some problems with attaching the interfacing that was called for in the collar and in the neckline facing since my interfacing was all white and would show through the eyelet lace. So originally, I put the interfacing on some black muslin and used that for the interfacing on those pieces.

Well, I just couldn't get the collar and neckline facing to assemble correctly. It looked terrible. And at first I thought that it was because the black muslin and the interfacing attached to the pieces was just too thick and was keeping it from bending into the right shape. So I ripped it all out, and bought some black interfacing to use instead. Last night I tried to reassemble it all with this version, and it still wouldn't come together right! The points weren't clean enough, the back of the dress was sort of gathered and wrinkled in a bad way, and the collar didn't line up right.

I'm really bummed because I love this material and I don't have enough left to do an easier dress with. So tonight I'm going to rip it out again, and give up on doing the version with the collar, and hopefully I have enough eyelet to cut out the neckline facing again and this time I don't think I"ll bother with interfacing, but just use the material plain or maybe with a black muslin backing to it. And if THAT doesn't work I may have to give up entirely and just make a skirt instead of a dress.

I also worked last night on this tunic dress, Butterick 4920, that I originally saw in blouse form (you can do a blouse or a dress with it) on a couple of blogs including Stacy Sews and Cat Fur Studio. The blouse would probably get better use, but I decided to go for the dress just because I had a ton of fabric for it, a pretty and smooth dark wine colored jersey that I got at one of my favorite SF sources for cheap cheap fabric, Fabrix on Clement Street. I chose the burgundy color as a replacement for black. I'm trying to get away from wearing too much black, and since the other dress that's giving me fits is black eyelet, and I also have a bunch of black poplin for a sort of mod shirt dress Burda pattern I just bought, I needed to branch out. This color is dark and deep enough for evening or for a more somber occasion (I have a wake to attend in NYC in April, and I might wear it for that) but isn't the same old black.

Quick word on Fabrix: I love it because it's so inexpensive, I always find (metered, but still) parking when I go by, usually on Monday afternoons on my way back from therapy, and the fabric is all on huge bolts at least 60" wide so you get lots for your money. The drawback is that they have very little in the way of notions. Well, that's not totally true, since they have a lot of ribbon by the yard, and a huge bin FULL of buttons, but you have to sift through the buttons for, like, hours to find all the matching ones you need. You also really have to look for a while to find the good fabric, because it's all sort of piled up everywhere and some of it is not only cheap (as in, inexpensive) but what I like to call cheap-ass (meaning tacky and not well-made). But I love the process of digging through lots of stuff, I find it entertaining and even calming, so that isn't really a drawback to me.

But back to the tunic dress. I shouldn't complain too much because it did come together mostly pretty well, and the fabric drapes beautifully, but the finished edge on the front modesty panel neckline gapes, isn't stitched straight, and looks yucky. It's because I'm not good at sewing details on stretch knit. I think I'll have to fix it by turning it under once more and somehow blind stitching it down in the hopes that the stitches won't show.

So my bad sewing night last night wasn't all bad I guess, because the frustration just made me more determined to come home tonight and fix it all. I hope it works out. I really want to make enough items to wear mostly things I made myself on my trip to New York, so that's an ambitious goal that I can't meet if I have to keep ripping stuff up and starting over again. My next adventure: learning to make buttonholes, so I can make some blouses (one from white lace, another from a sheer black with pink roses) and that shirt dress! Maybe this weekend if I don't have to work! Ooh, and I want to make an Easter dress too. More on that later.