Friday I was excited to get to the studio and continue work on the '40s dress (mentioned here). If you follow me on Instagram, you might've seen my post about the challenges of working with viscose. So I'd already had a taste of what might be required of me with this. But I was ready to take my time and continue forging ahead.
An aside here - I can sew, but like many of my other skills (knitting, cooking, bitching - hah!), I'm (more or less) one third trained, one third self-taught, and one third persistent. I also know that sometimes (I find this especially true in knitting) I have to read instructions over and over again to finally translate them into something I understand. It was with this mindset that I forged ahead.
Smack down 1: I thought I'd managed the pleats (there are some great detail photos from someone's successful project here), and I was patiently trying to get the #$?%!* bodice to line up with the &*$#! skirt.
No dice.
Here's another aside. It was kind of cold that day, and I was feeling less than hearty. Okay, I didn't feel like biking home on a SoBi so the ladyfriend was going to pick me up. However, it wasn't like I could call her a couple of hours after she'd dropped me off. She had a grant deadline, and I didn't want to get in the middle of that.
So I decided to dig up an old project that I'd told Karen about - a pattern that I'd cut out who-knows-how-many-years-ago. (This means at least 13 or more years ago. I'm serious. I don't even know if I was living in Brooklyn when this all happened. I could've been living in DC, which I left in '94). It is in this amazing, almost ephemeral silk chiffon - the kind where you can't tell which side is the right side. Pretty gorgeous, I have to say.
Now another aside - I'm positive that my mother and I collaborated on this. I have all the notions and silk thread even to make the dress, but I don't know why we didn't cut out a lining. I mean, it's silk chiffon; it's totally transparent. Also, we cut this out either before I realized that sewing pattern sizes don't necessarily match conventional off-the-rack sizes or I was a little smaller. Both are possible (she says, as she takes a sip of beer).
An aside here - I can sew, but like many of my other skills (knitting, cooking, bitching - hah!), I'm (more or less) one third trained, one third self-taught, and one third persistent. I also know that sometimes (I find this especially true in knitting) I have to read instructions over and over again to finally translate them into something I understand. It was with this mindset that I forged ahead.
Smack down 1: I thought I'd managed the pleats (there are some great detail photos from someone's successful project here), and I was patiently trying to get the #$?%!* bodice to line up with the &*$#! skirt.
No dice.
Here's another aside. It was kind of cold that day, and I was feeling less than hearty. Okay, I didn't feel like biking home on a SoBi so the ladyfriend was going to pick me up. However, it wasn't like I could call her a couple of hours after she'd dropped me off. She had a grant deadline, and I didn't want to get in the middle of that.
So I decided to dig up an old project that I'd told Karen about - a pattern that I'd cut out who-knows-how-many-years-ago. (This means at least 13 or more years ago. I'm serious. I don't even know if I was living in Brooklyn when this all happened. I could've been living in DC, which I left in '94). It is in this amazing, almost ephemeral silk chiffon - the kind where you can't tell which side is the right side. Pretty gorgeous, I have to say.
Now another aside - I'm positive that my mother and I collaborated on this. I have all the notions and silk thread even to make the dress, but I don't know why we didn't cut out a lining. I mean, it's silk chiffon; it's totally transparent. Also, we cut this out either before I realized that sewing pattern sizes don't necessarily match conventional off-the-rack sizes or I was a little smaller. Both are possible (she says, as she takes a sip of beer).
