Bandage Bodice Gown

June 13, 2016 ~ Tia Dia ~ 12 Comments

Here are the promised pictures of the finished bandage bodice dress. dress 3

Here’s a close up of the layered elastic forming the bodice.

prom dress 2

And another one almost showing the full length skirt. It did hang rather nicely despite the unusual combination of heavy polyester jersey lining and thin polyester crepe fashion fabric.

prom dress 1

I cannot tell you how glad I am this unusual request (experiment) turned out so well. I must say, it suited the client to a ‘T’. She was pleased, and I’m sure will get a lot of wear from it once I hem it to be worn with flats.

Stay tuned for the next graduation commission in yellows and pinks.

But I DID make the dress

May 29, 2016June 13, 2016 ~ Tia Dia ~ 12 Comments

Well, the bandage dress is finished, and I thought I’d share what I came up with for the bandage bodice, just in case any of you anywhere out there in sewing land would like to have something that looks kinda-sorta-almost like a Leger bandage dress, but without the $4,000 price tag. After doing some research on the Leger bandage dresses, it became very clear that they are a closely guarded copyrighted design, and it would be impossible to even find the fabric (rayon-lycra) in strips in order to stitch them together.

I had initially thought I would do a Sherri Hill take on the bodice, since I’d become quite familiar with her designs while trying on prom dresses with DD1 earlier this year. Her elastic dresses are strips of elastic stitched in overlapping layers to a woven bodice. Something like this dress (which DD1 tried on and thought was a too h-u-g-e, albeit fun, dress).

I proceeded along the Sherri Hill lines, did a fitting for an underlining of power net mesh (which was easily pulled over the client’s head), and stitched the elastic, in the round, to make the bodice.

But at the fitting, it was impossible for her to pull it on, all elasticated, over her head. The elastic also didn’t fit as tight and flat under the bust as hoped once she’d got it on. So, as I had initially suggested a zipper was required, which was not what she wanted, we had a discussion about adding a zipper. I wasn’t sure what I would do for the zip, as there would be a tremendous amount of strain on any closure. A lot of unpicking of triple stretch stitches ensued. In the process, I discovered that the fuzzy nylon that covered the elastic snagged, pulled and warped like crazy if I wasn’t super careful.

Once it was all unpicked, I had an incredible brainwave.

I ditched the power mesh underlining and stitched the elastic together along the length, slightly overlapping each strip, and shaping each layer on my dress form. The ends of the short pieces are all bound with bemberg lining to keep them tidy. The bodice is snug and shaped.

It worked a treat.

But how to make that tight elasticated bodice close up? Stitch the bottom row of elastic closed for a secure base.

Add hook and eye closures, and an invisible zip to close over it all as neatly as possible. Hopefully the hooks/eyes will keep the nylon invisible zip from splitting apart.

Here’s the inside back.

Here’s the inside front, where you can see the rows of elastic stitched together and the ends bound with bemberg remnants.

The skirt was gathered and attached to a length of elastic, which was then attached to the bodice. This picture is from before I re-thought the bodice construction.

skirt

And, to date, I have no pictures of the finished dress on the client. Hopefully she’ll remember to send me one and I’ll add it to this post. I was surprised that the dress looked as nice as it did when it was all done, considering the poor quality of the materials. The bodice was as snug as desired and the skirt hung gracefully to the floor.

I do NOT want to make this dress

April 22, 2016June 13, 2016 ~ Tia Dia ~ 22 Comments

About one month ago I was asked if I made custom dresses. I demurred, but the emails persisted, so I gave a quote for the job once I’d seen the dress I was to copy.

But I can tell you that the bodice looked like a very bad attempt to copy an Herve Leger bandage-type bodice, with a very large piece of cotton sewn to the bottom of it in a huge circle skirt. In the pic that I’m supposed to work from for this project, the skirt fabric looks like it’s been wasting away in the back of a closet for about 18 months, it’s so creased. And the ‘bandages’ of the bodice are AWOL.

Ms. Rs materials

My quote for labour/design was deemed acceptable, and I was given a bag with the goodies you see above:

about 1.7m of waistband elastic for the bandage bodice
3m of 115cm wide very lightweight poly crepe (pictured on the left)
3m of 150cm wide heavy jersey for the lining (pictured on the right)

The dress is supposed to be a pullover dress – no zipper or other openings, thank you!

I have been avoiding this, but today is the first fitting.

*sigh*

I am not working with anything else so I must make magic from these fabrics. I really don’t know how I’m going to copy that bandage bodice, which is why I’m loathe to tackle this project, so wish me luck.

The skirt will be a piece of cake, I’m sure – a simple A-line jersey lining with a double-width gathered poly crepe skirt stitched directly to the waistband elastic.

The bodice will require samples, trial, error and something called faking it.

I hope it works…

It’s WDS Day!

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 ~ Tia Dia ~ 13 Comments

Happy World Down Syndrome Day, everyone! Down Syndrome (also called Trisomy 21) is caused by a third 21st chromosome, so we celebrate it on March 21st.

January Slowjo Sewing

January 31, 2016March 8, 2016 ~ Tia Dia ~ 13 Comments

January has been a slow rather mojo-less sewing month this year. I had all these grand plans, and have felt zero compulsion to sew anything. So I’ve been fixing, mending and twiddling on a few things.

First, I tweaked the bodice of DD2’s Christmas dress (Burda 12/2012 #110). Originally it looked like this, with ponte and lace all eased into a higher-than-designed neckline. It didn’t work, and there was an absurd amount of ease to sew into the neckline. And, because it still wasn’t decent enough, I added a triangular lace insert at the CF. I was not happy with it – it looked so less-than-custom-made, but it had to do for Christmas.

Now, after lowering the CF on the ponte under layer (the bodice is unlined) as far as it would go – and as designed, I might add – and removing the CF lace insert, it looks like this.

bodice

Not a big difference, but the fit along the neckline is much better. I’m still getting my head wrapped around fitting DD2 and what looks good on her. Most of my sewing queue over then next couple of months will be for her, so hopefully I will learn a lot!

Then I agreed (with dread in my heart) to redo window valances. I always hate being asked to do things out of my comfort zone, because I hate feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no pictures of the project, but let me just say that it was an interesting ride. In early December, I met with the client and the interior designer, and confessed that home dec sewing is not in my field of expertise. So the designer measured all the windows, wrote them down for me, and off I went with the valances, her measurements and extra fabric from the client’s storage room. After pulling one of the valances apart, I understood the method of construction, and started in on the project. Everything was neat and tidy and I was pleased with my amateur work. Up went the valances, and the client called me after Christmas to tell me that they were too short for two of her windows. My bad. I didn’t check the math of my measurements with a calculator. And, to top it all off, the designer’s depth measurements were off by 2.5cm, so everything had to be taken apart and re-done so the corner box pleats actually hung at the corners.

And I’ve been BUGGED – BUGGED, I tell you – by the little details of the project. The valances had a centre box pleat, which should have hung in the visual centre of the windows i.e. in the centre of the centre sliding frames. But visual centre did not equal mathematical centre, so the centre pleats hang about 4cm off visual centre. Do you follow me here? And, of course, the designer wanted the centre pleat to hang in the visual centre, not the actual centre. Ugh.

And that bugs me. BUGS ME!! Part of me wants to go back and re-do those damn valances a third time, just so they can all be truly custom-made for those damn windows.

BUT…. and this is a big ‘but’…. I stopped to study a valance in my bedroom which was made a couple of years ago by one of the best drapery guys in the city. He had worked solely off the window measurements the designer had given him, and after carefully looking at all the proportions, I realized that the mathematical centre of that valance was definitely not the visual centre in relation to my bedroom window.

And he is a paid drapery expert. So I’m not kicking myself anymore. C’est la vie, and all that. But I did learn a lesson for the next time someone wants valances made by little ol’ moi. Experience, experience! Best teacher ever.

The next project was to give myself a new ironing board cover.

new board cover

I have no pictures of the old one, but I will tell you that the foam padding had melded to the cotton cover through overuse. I made mine from washed muslin and the leftover cotton batting (from my first attempt to make interlined Roman blinds). It looks clean and the thick new padding is wonderful. I should have done this months ago.

Then I put the waistband ties onto a pair of hip-hop trousers for DD1. I made these last spring, I think, and she grabbed them before I could finish them, and has been wearing them ever since. Yesterday she was walking around the house in them like she’d had some sort of horrible injury in the pelvic region, and I asked her why she was walking so oddly. She said she had to walk like a weirdo so the pants wouldn’t fall down. *headshake* The ties have been hanging on a project board since the trousers were made, so today they finally ended up on my sewing table to be properly finished.

And now I’m working through three projects that were cut late summer:

a safari skirt (Burda 04/2010 #140)

a silk scarf panel top (Burda 07/2012 #118), albeit with different fabricand multiple-gored skirt for DD1 (Burda 06/2013 #132).And I had hoped to get myself moving on Jungle January and Chris’s #JeansinJanuary, but I lacked both the conviction and motivation to start in on anything. So I’ve missed both, but I am determined to finish all my UFOs before I begin something new.

Vogue 8600

December 5, 2015December 12, 2015 ~ Tia Dia ~ 15 Comments

Here’s my latest matelassé project, Marcy Tilton’s jacket. It’s got a large, oversized collar and deep pleats at the waist for shaping. The pattern photos must be made with a thin taffeta fabric, because the jacket looks super crisp. Mine doesn’t because of the bulky fabric I chose to make. Mine also seems to have more shape, because the body inside it has waaay more shape than the model’s, which seem to sit perfectly straight from shoulder to hemline.

The matelassé was bulky and had a mind of its own, so each seam and box pleat is catch-stitched down in order to ‘press’ the seams. Pressing a scrap of the matelassé completely flattened it. Not good. I tried ‘pressing’ the pleat edges through the hem bands in the front as the line drawing indicates so that they’d be crisp, but the fabric moves a lot on its own, and the edges/corners would not lay flat. So I left them alone as a nod at a peplum look.

The cuffs are very deep – about 8 inches (20cm) – and are designed to be folded back, if desired. I’ve been wearing them not quite doubled back in half as they seem too short exactly in half, and too long not folded up at all. And the back pleats release at the bottom of the shoulder blades. I made a sway back adjustment, and shortened the waist on this version, but you can see how it balloons out in the back while being worn. I’m sure most of this is due to my fabric choice.

As mentioned in my previous post, the front facings, undercollar and hem facings were all cut from a crinkle polyester taffeta from deep stash. The lining is rayon bemberg in a tone-on-tone match with the crinkle taffeta. No one’s going to see it, because this jacket looks pretty weird unbuttoned. Here’s the underside of the collar.

See how large this thing is? It looks fabulous as a dramatic collar, but it’s not quite big enough to keep one’s head warm.

My final thoughts on this: It’s an interesting fabric in an interesting jacket pattern. I think if I had made it out of a crisp taffeta (suggested fabric, btw), it would have looked like a box with a big collar on me. It has an extraordinary amount of ease – no FBA required! I have long wanted to make up this pattern, just for the collar, and I’m happy I did.

Bound Buttonholes and Matelassé

November 22, 2015November 22, 2015 ~ Tia Dia ~ 11 Comments

I’m working on another matelassé jacket, and kinda sorta wanted to do bound buttonholes. I used a crinkle polyester taffeta, stabilized with fusible interfacing, as the contrast binding and the facing on the centre front pieces of the jacket.

The matelassé is a gold/olive green/black weave in I guess what you would call a ‘patchwork’ pattern. The gold crinkle taffeta was the best match from my stash.

Can I just tell you that I decided to make bound buttonholes after the facing and collar was attached? I had planned to go the lazy machine-stitched buttonhole route, but after a series of trials on scraps, decided bound buttonholes would look the best. Instead of a straight-forward set of buttonholes, this became a fiddling-redo-rip-out-redo game, but I’m happy with the results.

What’s the best make-it-unnecessarily-difficult-extra-work decision you’ve ever made on a project?

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