Three dresses in three days: sew-insanity

July 23, 2014August 11, 2014Leave a comment

Several Fridays ago, i took my sewing machine to my partner’s flat. His flatmate was on holiday for two weeks, and in this narrow timeframe I am allowed to commandeer half of the dining room table for the machine and its little collection of gadgets.

I am insanely grateful for this because i have been wanting to make dresses for months, but my flat gets too hot for it. Temperatures reach 29C in my room (normal temperature in the summer in there is 27C, 3 to 7 degrees warmer than outside), the side effect of which is that the second i walk in, instead of digging for fabric, i remove hot clothes, lie on the bed, and launch netflix while trying to move as little as possible…. “Unbearable” is a word that comes to mind. I avoid staying at home these days. And am planning to move out, ahead of contract end, in march next year. I do hope that goes all right. That place is not liveable from June to September, and does not deserve the nearly £1000 of rent (all bills excluded) i pay for one of two rooms. Ok. So flat-hate rant over (it is impairing my productivity!!!!) let’s go back to dresses.

So what’s been going on?

Saturday, I made a dress.
Sunday, I made a dress.
Monday, I made a dress.
Tuesday, I wore Monday’s dress to work and then to meet friends for dinner.

On Wednesday, I was going to dinner with colleagues, ostensibly to talk about work and taking over the world. So no sewing. And no new dress.

The fun thing is that for two of the three dresses, i made a pattern from scratch. The Sunday dress, i used an old faithful i love. And i didn’t finish it, i am still missing the zipper and hem…

For the Saturday dress, a bamboo jersey maxi dress with a button placket (that was the dumbest idea…), i measured myself and plotted the basic half-torso pattern pieces. One for the front, one for the back. (The back one is 10cm narrower in the bodice part, and 4cm longer in the skirt part)

There are no photos of the finished dress…. It aggravated me too much.

Turns out bamboo jersey is like liquid mercury! A slithering little devil that tries to break your machine! I don’t think I have a single straight stitch on the entire dress! It was very difficult to work with, kept snagging, breaking threads, warping, wiggling, moving at different speeds under the foot….
I got super angry. But then two days later i wore the dress around the house….

So I will try again with two changes to my strategy:
One: teflon sewing foot so things glide nicely.
Two: masking tape! Apparently one way to make sure slithering fabric stays straight is to put tape next to where your seam will be! I’ll be trying that.
I already have jersey needles. What i might do is buy some thinner thread. Maybe my plain cotton one wasn’t right for the uber-lightweight stretchy fabric.

About sewing feet. DO NOT BUY THEM ON AMAZON IF YOU OWN A BERNINA 330. I bought 4 sewing feet compatible with my type of machine. Except one nearly broke my machine when the needle hit the foot, and on all the others, the needle also hits the foot, it doesn’t go through the hole. That would be a good £35 i have thrown away. And i still cannot apply bias tape or put in an invisible zipper. More money needs to be spent. Don’t make that mistake!!

Sunday dress was a pleasure to work with. I had bought the fabric in the winter, a lovely half cotton half viscose blend, with a brushed side that felt soooooo soft! (The other was a bit shiny) I bought it in two colours, and worked with the pink one this time. Stitches were perfect. Thread was perfect, everything just worked. One of the perks of working from a pattern and with fabric that resembles muslin (imagine lightweigt bedsheet fabric).

And here is the dress I wore to work and then to dinner. It was fairly quick to make. Just one evening.

Overambitious…

June 12, 2014November 28, 20221 Comment

Many many months ago, I bought a most excellent book about draping. I almost immediately started plotting a pattern on my dressmaker’s doll… Where it stayed until last night. It must have been a solid 6 months on that doll. So long, in fact, that some of the green Sharpie marks I had made on the baking paper (who needs specialised pattern paper?) have begun to wash out from light exposure. The thing to learn, clearly, is that green sharpies are not lightfast.

I took the marked pieces off the doll, laid them out on top of 2-way stretch jersey, and cut. With my new fiskars tool! Think pizza cutter, but with a razor-sharp disc, which cuts through layerS (the capitalisation is intentional) of fabric.

I have assembled nothing yet. I only cut the fabric last night! Curious to see what will come of it.

Meanwhile, I did use the rolling cutter to make my traditional shift dress, in turquoise this time. It was SO much easier to follow the curves than it is wi scissors!! I wish I had known about these cutters earlier, they are a godsend.

I have no photos to post of the finished dress. Messed up there. And it’s in the laundry by now.

How about some changing room selfies that i will be using for inspiration in my (very near) future projects?

First up, a Roland Mouret dress.

A bit of Dior (the dress) and Chanel (the bag), which i may also attempt to make variations of. I’m a big fan, with a small budget than i would like, and an appetite for craft!

Practice makes perfect… dresses for little girls

April 8, 2014April 11, 20141 Comment

The lovely man i have been with for two years now got me a present this winter. He sponsored the acquisition of an amazing Bernina 330.

Here are some unboxing photos of that legend of swiss engineering.

Thing is… I do not know how to use these fancy things. I’ve always used old machines. By old i mean late 19th or early 20th century. So. What to do?

Well, this calls for a new project, of course. With infallible (and humble, clearly) logic, i concluded that making a dress for myself might use most of the stitches, but would take forever. So. What to do?

Fortunately, i have an almost-niece. The lovely man’s brother has a daughter. I’ve never met her in person, but i’ve seen her on skype dozens of times. She’s going to be 18 months old very soon, and is adorable.

So a plan, and project, hatched: make a dress for my man’s niece. If I muck it up, i will have destroyed a lot less fabric than if i tried to make a dress for myself. If i succeed, she ends up with a lovely new summer dress of my own devising.

Here is a photo story of how this project is going.

white wool crepe dress – part 1

January 13, 2014January 12, 2014Leave a comment

My latest project’s pattern comes from burda. I saw the magazine on a trip to Bavaria, and bought it. Amusingly, it is all in German, which makes making the dress a lot harder as I cannot follow the instructions!!

I loved the shape, so I decided to turn it into my holiday project. We’re in January now, and it’s still not finished, but I still think of it as my holiday project given I started it over the Christmas holidays. Maybe I’ll wear it to dinner for Valentine’s with The Man. We’ll see.

I bought a lightweight wool crepe from a shop on Goldsworth road in London, near Shepherd’s bush. Specifically, it was from Unique fabric’s, a really small place with some very good natural fabrics. While I was there I could not resist and I picked up a viscose-cotton blend that was obscenely soft and inexpensive! Curious to see what I’ll make of it. Most likely a summer dress of some kind.

Step one was, as usual, copying the pattern off the burda sheets onto new sheets. I did it with a small Sharpie I have, which writes in blue. I loved the effect on the paper and was surprised it did not bleed through onto the burda pages.

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I then cut the fabric, both outer wool crepe and inner satin cotton lining (the light pink you’re seeing in the photo) together in one shot (across 4 layers), using pinking shears.

Assembly started off easily and quickly. First the required darts, then putting together the bodice, then the skirt, and then attaching them together. Getting the princess point in the waistline was a challenge. I think I managed. But attaching the bodice to the skirt was another challenge, which I decided to take in two steps. First, I attached the wool outer bodice to the wool outer skirt. And ideally I would then have sewn the lining sides together. But. I did not feel that the wool was strong enough to hold the entire weight of the skirt up on its own, so given I’d made the skirt with the lining thickening up the wool, I decided to hand-stitch the waist seam across all layers, in a neat little seam that would hold the weight. It took a while, but it wasn’t too hard to do.

The tricky bit was the sleeves. At this point I was on holiday at my parents’ where there are no working sewing machines as far as I am told. So I stitched everything by hand, much like I had to for the teal silk dress over the summer. Given I was just putting together sleeves, and it was going to be delicate pleating work anyway, I was happy to do that by hand. Now that I’ve come home though I’ll be taking the sleeve apart on the long seam, and restitching the lining and outer long seams separately along the stitching line I put in by hand. The shape is fine, and cuff works, I just need it to be fully straight and with a clean inside seam.

My next challenge, and which will be part of the next post, is to make cuffs to put on the sleeves. I have never made cuffs before. I am terrified. But it’ll be worth it I think. That dress looks really nice!!

The teal silk dress

September 20, 2013September 20, 20131 Comment

A long overdue post, because I finished the dress and wore it in July.

This dress posed three huge challenges.

1 – I’d never worked with sandwashed silk before, and it’s a very delicate fabric

2 – I lost my trusty shift dress pattern, and had to create a pattern using my own body measurements from scratch

3 – My mother’s sewing machine was eating my fabric and tearing holes in it last time I used it. She confirmed it was “broken”, and so I was left with needing to hand-stitch every single part of this dress.

How did it go? Well let’s just say I’ve never worked harder in my life on a dress. And I made a friend’s wedding dress last year! This was harder. Less stressful, because I did have a backup plan for what to wear… But harder, for the three reasons listed above.

How did it go? Scroll past the photos to read a short version of the highlights.

: drawing out the pattern

: adjusting the pattern

: making the straps

: a finished strap

: first fitting (no straps)

: first fitting from the back (no straps)

: second fitting (with straps)

: second fitting from the back (with straps)

: wearing it on the night

: on my way to my friend’s wedding!

: You can see the dress peeking on the dancefloor

I was lucky enough to have found, a few days before leaving, this amazing book on pattern making. It’s very simple, has practically no instructions, but for someone who can solve complex mathematical equations and likes building IKEA things without instructions (or, ok, confirming her guesses before ending up with a table instead of a bookcase…), it was enough.

One of the photos above shows me being creative and trying to use baking paper as my pattern paper. An excellent idea. Except I pulled the paper out of the roll, and had about 30cm in my hand. It was empty. And as I started this on a Sunday when shops are closed all over Greece… well… I was lucky to find some IKEA craft paper nearby.

The first version of the dress had no straps on the shoulders. Seeing how it sat, however, I had to do something, and decided to add straps. I made them by hand, each stitch done by hand, and flipped once I was done. I used an interesting trick and stitched thread inside the tube. I’d attached it at one end, kept it inside the tube I was stitching (while inside out), and when it was ready to flip, I used that thread to pull it inside-out! Worked like a charm 🙂 Of course I had to be careful and not tug at the thread until I broke it. It was more about using it to help ease the fabric through. It made a huge difference though!

The fitting was a bit difficult, as I had limited assistance from my mom. She likes things very loose, I like them well-fitted. In retrospect, having had dinner in the dress and danced for more than 5 hours wearing it, I should have made it a little bit looser. My stitches held beautifully (I was more surprised than you are), and the dress looked amazing.

Another trick I used to help the cowl drape properly. I noticed the dress was falling backwards. Normal, given how I’d cut it. So I decided to weigh it down on the front. I made tiny pouches from the same fabric as the dress, put three loonies ($1 coins from Canada) in each, and stitched them closed, and to the base of the straps on the front of the dress. I had to secure them on the sides, too, as they had a tendency to dangle and get in the way. They held really well through the night, and even through the subsequent handwashing of the dress. I didn’t have to tug at my neckline, it stayed where it was supposed to be, which was great!

What I learnt:
– You CAN make a dress entirely by hand. But you really don’t want to. It takes forever.
– If you’re going to dance in a dress and feed in a dress, leave yourself a couple of inches of room for it.
– Making a pattern from body measurements involves some guesswork and 3-dimensional magic (which I’m not sure I possess)
– You can make a gorgeous silk shift dress with barely 1m of material (at £15/m, this is a bargain dress!) and it looks stunning. I did spend a good 20 hours making it though, so your call.

Final sketches and draft handmade pattern for a new dress

July 22, 2013July 22, 2013Leave a comment

I want to make a dress to wear to a friend’s wedding this weekend. Yes. This weekend. In 5 days. I’m not sure I’ll manage, but my sketchbook looks more optimistic.

I have the fabric, the zip, the matching thread and the dress idea.

Alas, mother says the (terrible anyway) sewing machine we have here is broken. And, more critically, i do not have a pattern to make the dress with. So here i am exploring designs, taking measurements, and trying to make my first ever pattern from scratch. Well. First ever non-jersey pattern.

(Also posted on exintaris.com)

Dress sketches for my next project

July 15, 2013Leave a comment

Grey gown with twistie collar

January 11, 2013January 11, 20133 Comments

I did finish the beautiful grey dress!!

You can wear it with a closed neck…

Or with the collar draped across your shoulders.

And let’s not forget the back!!
Note the seam detail.

Glamorous grey gown

August 13, 2012May 3, 2013Leave a comment

Today I spent about five hours at Old Spitalfields market. I love the place. I adore it. Walking around, seeing the designers, the shoes, the clothes, the bric-à-brac, the fabrics, the beads, the metals, the prints… everything is such a joy, a feast for the senses and spirit! It is a great market, with a huge emphasis on fashion and creative endeavours in personal expression and quality. I could easily say it’s my favourite market in London! So there I was, walking around for hours, looping around again and again and again, seeing, touching, examining stitches, reading labels… It was an excellent afternoon! The only catch is, of course, I left inspired. That, and I had a coffee with my partner this morning and another coffee with a friend in the afternoon. I only started drinking coffee nine years ago, and the boiled bean’s effects are still very strongly felt on my system. So… when I got home… I couldn’t sit still. A good thing, given I’ve been going completely and absolutely stir crazy with the work-at-home requirement of the past three weeks. First week was nice, I was at my partner’s flat. The past two weeks, however, were torture, as my flat is oddly inhuman. I lacked colour, light, sound, texture, smell, and most of all human contact. So spending the afternoon in Spitalfields market was bliss. (window) Shopping yesterday was great too!

And when I got home, I had to make something. I simply couldn’t not make something. I popped some frozen things in the oven (expedient dinner), and dug into my fabric box for something stripy and pink I knew was lurking in there. And I came across this loooovely dark grey jersey! Which I decided to play with instead of the stripy pink (that was meant to be for practice anyway). And this is what I made, just pinned on the doll.

Why am I writing this post? To give my fingers a short break from rolling edges and hand-stitching. My sewing machine, much as I love it, is form 1919 and can’t, for the life of it (or me), roll an edge in a coherent manner, despite me having the correct little foot for that feature. It just doesn’t work. And I’m rather good with my hands. That attachment just isn’t made for jersey. Shame about that, as I love wearing jersey, and working with it as a dressmaking fabric. Comfortable, versatile… Anyway. I’ll need to invest in a machine that can work with jersey and roll edges for me.

So my fingers are done taking a short break. Time to go back to more hand-stitching now. With another episode of the West Wing. Took me a while to discover that show properly!

I made a wedding dress!

July 10, 20121 Comment

These are my good friends Paola and Francesco. They just got handfasted last weekend. And yes, the title of this post gave it away… I made the wedding dress. It is very simple, and fitted Paola beautifully! I’m so happy she asked me to make it!! It was a very busy month, and a very blessed one. Despite finishing the dress last week, I have yet to put away my sewing machine. And I may not put it away any time soon.

So. How did this come about? I’m not sure. But there were a few hints along the way… Nothing major. I couldn’t very well give the game away… but I sure was happy to be working on it, so glimpses of this made it to my #365 project on instagram.

So yes. The dress is complete, and has been worn. Tomorrow, the bride leaves on her honeymoon. The handfasting was beautiful, the couple surrounded by people who love them very much. Everyone was happy to be there, happy for them, happy for everything. It was a great day! And I am grateful to have been such a huge silent part of it. 🙂 I like it backstage. The perspective is breathtaking!

Seamstress Sophie

Dressmaking and other sewing experiments

Tag: Dress