Made With Love In Every Stitch

 This dress will be a gown even Sponge Bob's grandma would appreciate.

Don't Be Frayed!  Everything Will Be OK.

We spent Jenny's last day of her visit working on the hem of the dress. We began by sewing a seam along the edge to keep things from fraying. 

Then we ironed, and ironed, and ironed the hem into place.  Jenny worried about the lining hem fraying away on us, so we ironed that edge as well while we were at it.

Ironing Away

Seven hours later...
We had finally ironed the hem, and pinned the lining down, and I was able to sew the lining hem into place.  This went quite quickly as the lining is much smaller than the gown.

Hand Sewing the Hem

Then Jenny set to work hand sewing the hem. We had used the wonderful red clips we bought early on into the project to clip the gown hem down rather than use pins. Pins are scary. We don't want to snag the down and cause a run. That would be very bad, especially at this point in the project.

These clips have been worth their weight in gold. Well, maybe not actually gold, given the price per ounce, but they were kind of pricey, and we debated buying them. We think this was one of the best purchases we made. That and the dupioni.
Seven hours later...

Listening to Los Straight Jackets

Jenny was still hemming the dress when it came time for her to leave. She didn't want to go with the hem not finished, but family duties prevail this time.


We packed up our gear and clipped the dress to Stephanie's Mini-me. We brought it down to the family room where it can hang undisturbed in relative dark and dry conditions for a couple weeks until we are all together again.

It's looking better each time.
Even before the added overskirt of lace, this
is already a beautiful dress. We cannot wait to get back at it in a week and a half!

The Back of the Dress and those Amazing Clips

Dress by Ikea

You know how when you are building a shelf from Ikea and you get to the end and there's a piece left over, and you stare at it uneasily, thinking, Huh! I wonder what that piece is for! Maybe they threw in an extra?

Our work today was much like that.

We made slow progress at first, mostly in the wrong direction.  We were still struggling with the back pieces, and trying to make it work. This is always a bad sign, but we refused to read it for quite some time.

We sewed the back to the lining just like we had done with the other side before we'd given up for the night. Flipped it over, and dang! It wasn't right. Ripped out the seams, pieced it together anew after much deliberation and flipping of the dress over to see what we had done on the other side.

Taking my turn at seam rippping

Sewed again, flipped again, swore again. No matter how many different ways we tried to sew it, it always came out wrong. I lost count on the number of times. Jenny thinks it was six. Noon came and went, and we had not had a break, but the problem seemed so fixable if we could only understand what was wrong.

We stuffed Stephanie's model with batting to give her more firmness, and put her into the dress to see if we could figure it out. And then it hit us. Both of us at the same time, without a word to the other, realized the problem. We were missing pieces on the back!

The Missing Pieces

On Tuesday, when we were unpacking all of the pieces from when we'd packed up in early June, we found a piece of fabric and discussed what it was for. Huh! I wonder where this goes!  Maybe it was a test piece? Maybe it was extra? We had discussed way back when the need to add panels to the back. We'd cut out the pieces. We'd underlined them. They were italicized, even. But then we'd had to pack everything up and tuck it all away until this week.

Somehow in the packing and unpacking, we forgot that we never attached those back pieces.  Suddenly everything fell into place. All the trouble we'd been going through to piece the back together was because we were doing it wrong!  Lesson learned: if something refuses to work, there's probably a reason.  Second lesson learned: do not ignore those nagging feelings about that extra piece that probably goes somewhere. It does.

In the end, we made very good progress. We pieced together the back--not without some seam ripping and resewing, but we've come to expect that at this point. Jenny hand basted some of the back seams and then hand basted the train to the back of the dress. We found some ribbon we thought might look good on the back, although Jenny's going to make some from the extra silk, so this ribbon was just to test the idea.

And now it looks gorgeous, although it is a bit askew on our Mini-Steph.

Dress back with test ribbon

Tomorrow we plan to hem the dress and hand baste on the lace overskirt. We shall see!

Good St. Anne & The Dragons

On the first morning of this marathon sewing session things were not going well. Thread tension was too tight. The standard presser foot was exchanged for a zipper foot to create less drag on the material and therefor create less pulling/puckering of material. The new footie had a different feel - much more responsive to the sewer's every little move. I compare it to the learning curve one faces when switching from a slow, heavy, clunky Huffy bike to a speedy, lightweight racer bike like my Motobecane. A few crashes until you learn how to handle it.

The hardworking machine

At some point we both started heartily wishing for a patron saint of seamstresses, and decided to look for one when we broke for lunch. We would trudge along without our helpful saint until then.

At lunchtime we cast our google net and came up with St. Anne. Awesome! Feeling good about our new found patroness, we returned to the dress.

And wouldn't you know it! Our efforts have been noticeably more successful ever since we've become mindful of our good saint. I hope she continues to smile on our endeavor.
 

The dress front

It just so happens that on Wednesday we were not giddy with progress. Not until about 7 pm that is, when we hung the dress from a curtain rod and could really see the amazing progress and gorgeousness of the dress. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Got off to a bit of a late start. Actually overslept. Dang! Quick bite of toast and slurp of coffee and off to slay a dragon, maybe two! Who knows, maybe St. Anne helps in that area as well?

Dragon Number One: Lining! Personally, I've been afraid of the great hulking Lining Dragon ever since I realized skillful installation of said dragon was integral to the success of the dress. We had dodged the dragon so far, but today we had to tame him and render him useful.

I'll have you know that we successfully joined the lining to the dress! After a couple attempts, of course. We had decided at our last marathon get-together in early June that the lining needed to be put in wrong side out, which is to say, finished side showing where the pickups in the lace and skirt would be. Sewing the lining in went really really well. Until we turned the work around to see how the outer dress would look. Hmmm. Wrong side lining means seams don't show at the bottom of the dress. Which is good! But they do show at the top of the dress; not acceptable at all. Sigh.

We had been quite confident of the workability our plan at this point. To the extent that we had sewn the main seam and the stay-stitching in teeny-length stitches. Hence the job of ripping out those smug little bastiches took longer than it might have, had we been a little less sure of ourselves.

We are nothing if not lesson-learners, and our lesson had been learned. Proceed with caution and large stitches until certain of a good outcome.

The dress back modeled by Teresa

It really is amazing how much material goes into the making of a wedding dress. When you dive into the process you find you have made three dresses - the dress, the underlining for the dress, and the lining for the dress. And in our case, we have an additional overskirt of the prettiest lace you ever saw. Bridal dot lace. I am being completely spoiled working with such high quality materials - I don't think I ever want to go back to cotton or synthetic materials. Dupioni and beautiful lace for me from now on!

Dragon Number Two: Working on essentially three dresses at once means it's really easy to get mixed up on which piece gets sewn where, or even which piece is the dress and which is the lining. Sorting out this mass of material takes up a good bit of our time, and thus qualifies as our second dragon.

Lots of layers of fabric

Dragon Number Three, and perhaps our most fearsome dragon of all: For reasons we did not yet  understand, we had become very confused at the end of our work session, and were feeling really frustrated - why couldn't we replicate a seam that we had just done on the opposite side? We were absolutely unable to think straight enough to figure out how to sew this particular seam again, and decided to quit sewing for the day, sleep on the problem, come at it fresh tomorrow morning. We were probably tired. We'd been sewing for about 8 hours already. Time to break for the evening.

We decided we needed to be able to see how the dress looked hanging up - how did it drape, was it looking like we hoped it would look? So we went to a lower level of the house to look for a good place to hang the wedding dress. Coming upstairs again we became aware of Dragon Number Three: a strong natural gas smell; the oven had been turned on but the pilot light hadn't lit - and we were being gassed.

Lots of opening windows, getting outside to fresh air, putting things away for the day. Once our heads were clear, we came back inside and hung the dress and that's when we felt positively giddy over our progress. Three dragons slain!

We are making a couture wedding dress! And it is turning out beautifully.

What to Do About these Annoying Puckers?

Jenny and I were back at the dressmaking today. We decided to work from home rather than take everything to school because it would save time and we wouldn't have to pack everything up. I bought a six foot folding table just for the project. That should be big enough, right?

Our Cramped Working Conditions

We got started around 9 AM and began working backwards almost from the beginning. Not intentionally. We'd left off trying to sew the underlining to the train and having to stop when the machine refused to play nice. We started with a fresh bobbin, tested a practice piece and we were off! Yay!

But then, we found the pieces still would not match up. They were still coming out uneven. Back to the seam rippers. We found that the space we were working in was much smaller than we'd gotten used to. We kept stubbing our toes on chairs or footstools, and one six foot table was not really enough. Every available space was being used to hold something.

After a few more times of the sew a little, rip a little game, we had one piece together. I decided it might work better to take the train apart to do the other side of the underlining. Back to ripping apart, but this time with the intention of moving forward faster.

That seemed to work, and the second piece came together much better than the first. Yay! It was now noon, and we'd been at it for three hours. We finally had the train together.

The Lace Overskirt--Temporarily Positioned as a Shawl

For some reason that seemed to make sense at the time, I thought that sewing the underlining seam to the bottom of the train would be better left to after the dress was constructed. How silly! We had sewed the train together and then realized that I should have sewed that last seam before we pieced it together. Now it was much harder to sew and we spent much time working it out and ironing the seams.

In the end it worked out, but probably took a lot longer than it would have if I'd done it right the first time. I learned that fixing a mistake is the long road back from a short cut.  I also learned that I shouldn't rest my arm on a hot iron. Unfortunately, I had to learn it twice. As Jenny points out, I'm an experiential learner!

We began looking at how to sew the lining into the dress, and have a plan, but first we need to sew all the seams so that they don't fray. Unfortunately, the sewing machine refuses to do zigzag stitches anymore without seriously puckering the fabric. Much discussion and adjusting of the machine to remove the puckers led us to using a straight stitch instead. We will need to buy more thread before we are through, but we have a clear idea of what needs to be done, at least.

In the end, we needed to pack everything up because there is absolutely no room to leave anything out in this small house. But it was nice to work from home rather than drive in to work.  We could say at the end of the day that we were farther than we'd ever been.

Long-Distance W.O.W. (Work On Wedding) or When Jekyll & Hyde Make Couture Wedding Pieces

Mary & I have plans to work on Stephanie's wedding dress this week, hoping to put it all together this time, and do final fitting adjustments when Stephanie is here again. Great!

Wait, that means I need to have fabric & pearl flowers made up to actually sew on the dress. I don't have any ready. Dang!

So I went fabric shopping, taking along snatches of the dupioni and lace that we're using on Stephanie's gown. It took a couple visits to a couple different stores till I found fabric to match the color of Stephanie's dupioni, and some of the original lace - really pretty scalloped edges, lots of roses and leaves for cut outs. Great!

Over the next couple days I cut out fabric circles and made as many of the fabric & pearl flowers as I had pearls for. Great!

Ran out of pearls. Dang!

Thinking about how many more flowers we may need, I ordered more pearls. Great! They won't be here till middle of the week. Dang!

In the meantime I decided to look for lace to match what we're using on Stephanie's skirt. Maybe some of the fabric & pearl flowers should have matching lace. It's a good thing I ran out of nice pearls; now I can use matching lace on some of the flowers! Great!

The nearest store to have it on hand was JoAnn's Fabrics up in Wausau. 40 minutes away. Dang.

Since Tom was going up that way to play a gig he picked up more lace! Great!

I still have to wait for the pearls, though. Dang.

In the meantime, Stephanie and I exchanged photos of hair band possibilities. This is the first one we looked at together and thought was really pretty. Did some experiments with making my own tiny flowers. Burned my fingers. Dang. And the flowers looked horrible. Dang again. Went shopping for suitable small woodland flowers, vines, etc. Disappointed with selection available. Turns out most stores are now stocking fall colors - I should have done this a couple months ago. Double dang!

Nevermind. I'll make it work. Wait, did I just say that? I KNOW things never work when I say I'll make them work! Dang, dang, dang!

But wait! I had sent Stephanie this pic! And she really liked that! Great! I can totally do that! I feel super confident that I can make something just like that! So, I went shopping once more, taking my fabric scraps with me again ("Yay, another car ride!", they seemed to say), looking for just the right ribbon to match. Hmmm, what to do? Several widths and colors to choose from, white, ivory, cream... I picked up a few choices. My scraps were getting tired and cranky and needed a nap, and I wanted to get started on this fabulous new project anyway, so, ribbons and scraps in hand, we went home. Great!

Um. The ribbons don't really match very well. But maybe that's not so important, as the ribbon would be on Stephanie's head, and not very near her dress. So I could get started on the ribbon. Make a prototype. Use D-grade pearls. Maybe add some gaudy colors to highlight that this is a prototype, not the real thing. Just to test out materials.

Um. The ribbon is really slippery. And not the right color. And that is bugging me. Wait! I have matching lace! Two kinds! Wouldn't that be pretty as a hair band, with pearls sewn on! I could cut out some leaf & rose shapes from one type of lace and lay them over the dotted lace and add pearls on top of that... There, that's really pretty.

Wait, the lace is pretty stretchy. How's that going to work? I could put the lace over the ribbon. Which is ... dang it! Slippery. No, I could put the lace over some dupioni! Ooo, just like the dress! But wait. Now it's going to be bulky. Who wants a big honkin' bulky hair band on her wedding day? Dang it, now I spilled pearls all over the floor. Which is uneven. Now the pearls are playing hide and seek, and it's hot upstairs in my sewing room, and I'm hungry and frustrated and tired. Time for supper and walking in my garden.

Much better. Fed and rested and thinking straighter, I decided to listen to a nagging little beast of a thought whispering in the back of my mind. Dupioni. Already matches, same fabric. Cut on bias, would make a nice ribbon. Wait, it would make a perfect ribbon! And I love perfect!

Reinvigorated, I bounded upstairs, determined to create a masterpiece. Or at least a prototype, with a masterpiece to come. Hmmm. Mary offered me bigger pieces of dupioni and I declined. Why did I do that? Dang.

Never mind! I have a longish piece that's already kind of on the bias; I'll just cut some strips from that and make a ribbon and have the pearls sewn on in no time! Yay!

Dang. Not enough of a bias and it's gonna fray. And I only cut it a little more than an inch wide, so it's gonna be really narrow if I sew it into a tube... Well, what the heck, it's a prototype anyway, right? This is a learning experience, not supposed to be perfect yet, remember?

Some time later...

Tube sewn, turned, ironed, and looking really nice. Hmmm. Pearls. Sorted all the white pearls away from the peach, mauve, lavender, rose, pink pearls. Oh! I have jonquil and topaz crystals - really tiny ones. And peridot chips! Oooh, this could turn out really pretty. How about a few peach and rose pearls, too. It's woodland, it's romantic, it's elegant.

Bridal hair band prototype

Here it is! Looking really pretty, as predicted! And Stephanie loves it!

You know, I could sew some satin ribbon on the ends, make the ties long enough to tie easily...

But this was so much fun, I want to make another one!

Wait. I'm really out of pearls now. Dang.

Pearls have been shipped! I'll be able to make more this week! Great!

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Measuring the lining pieces

 Making this dress has been a dance--I'm not sure if it's a waltz or a tango. 

Still working on that back piece

We learned that ironing the dupioni is difficult. The creases iron in very easily, but iron out with more effort.

That led us to buying another iron. We read up on steaming, and found conflicting information on whether steaming the silk was a good idea or bad one. It turns out, it was a bad idea. Thankfully, we found that out on a piece of test fabric!  But the crease down the front of the dress is one we will continue to work on, slowly and carefully until it is all worked out.

The lining mostly done

The lining was (mostly) done, so we hung it from the ceiling for a bit to give us hope and inspiration.

But we struggled with how to put all the pieces together. The lace did not want to be hidden under all the dupioni, and we realized that putting it on top of the dress would make the dress even more beautiful than having it peeking out from underneath.

A skirt of lace

We'd already created the skirt out of lace. This was one of those two steps forward moments. We'd purchased enough of the lace to make a complete skirt. No need to run back to the store for more fabric. No more cutting and piecing together. It was meant to be!

We decided to put all the pieces together in new order to see how they'd fit.

The result, although hard to see in the photos, was amazing!

Dress with lace over-skirt

We found a use for the lace we'd purchased earlier that had marks on it so we couldn't use it as intended. We knew we were the only ones who would even know the marks were there (well, and anyone reading this blog) but we couldn't use them on the sleeves as we'd planned.

Now, we can use them on the underskirt, peeking out at the bottom.

All coming together bit by bit

We had it all together! Everything seemed to be working. And then the machine decided it needed a break.

I had to finish piecing the train together with the underlining, and the machine would not cooperate. Sew a little, rip a little... Here we were back at that when we could see the finish line. (Still hours of work away, but within sight!)

We ran out of time for the time being. The building was closing up for the day, Jenny had to be back home, Steph was flying out the next morning, and the realtor had houses to show us.

So, we packed up everything and bundled it home where it will sit until we can get together again in a few weeks. We shall reconvene soon. In the meantime, we have appliques to create and lace flowers to make, and decorations to design. We will be busy in other ways, but it is just not as much fun.

Time Keeps On Ticking, Ticking, Ticking, Into the Future

Working out design details.

We've been working on the couture dress, putting in marathon work sessions several days in a row, getting a few hours sleep and going back to it, slugging coffees and lattes and breves and slamming sandwiches and late night margaritas. We have laughed a LOT, which is good, because we are all acutely aware of time slipping by, the wedding date ever nearer, the learning curve on making the dress steep and unforgiving at times. So laughing is really good. We're not taking ourselves too seriously. We're taking the dress seriously, but not ourselves.

Armed with the dressform, the patterns, the "muslin" makings,
we're ready to start!

Sewing the "muslin". (It's not muslin.
It's a high quality silky synthetic!)

Keeping pattern pieces in order.
Hoping to minimize confusion!

Teresa holding the train piece of the dress pattern.
That's 1/2 of the total train, by the way!

We're learning a bit more about each other. For instance, I was told I have a way of speaking that alerts Mary to the possibility of a snafoo. Apparently I say, "Ummmm...." in a high, wavery voice and follow it up with something potentially mind-numbing like, "Did you mean to design the train with a run all the way across the back of it?" Of course I was hoping that Mary did indeed mean to design it that way, perhaps envisioning a clever disguise for that portion of the dress, and that it was not the case that we somehow had not noticed a flaw in the dupioni until we had sewn most of it together. To be fair, the flaw looked like a deep crease in the fabric, and didn't really show up until I was ironing the freshly sewn seams. At which point I quietly started to panic. And say, "Ummm...."

In case you're wondering, we decided this particular flaw was not a good addition to the dress design, furthermore this flaw was quite unacceptable, and we ripped stitches and bought more dupioni (checked it first for flaws this time), and the flawed piece was relegated to lining, where its imperfections will not cast aspersions on our efforts. Take that, evil flawmeister!

I've been reminded again and again how sweet, smart, funny, talented, and beautiful my nieces are, and how terrific Mary and Steve are, and how lucky I am to be part of the wedding dress project. It takes my breath away, this gift they have given me. I really want to do my best to help it all go right.

So it bothered me a lot that I had to leave my fellow couturians early, and alas, we did not finish before going our separate ways. :( Not to worry though, for we are reuniting soonish, to put the final, really gorgeous plan together. :) It really is going to be gorgeous. I haven't seen anything like it on any wedding blog or wedding magazine yet. I can't wait to see it on Stephanie on her wedding day!

Teresa, cutting some of the filmy fabric that we decided against.

This brings me to some pics I took early in the process. These pics show Mary, Teresa and me working out the details on the fake wedding dress - the "muslin", and if you look closely you'll see Teresa cutting some of the filmy, sheer, synthetic material that we decided we would not use, not even as a lining. As I mentioned earlier, the learning curve has been steep.

Fargin' Backstiches!

On June 4th, Jenny, Stephanie, Teresa and I began in earnest to make a wedding dress. Not just any wedding dress; Stephanie's couture wedding dress, of course!

We had lace--so beautiful, I wondered why we were hiding it under the dupioni. We had yards and yards of dupioni, and most of all, we had the time and space required to get it done.

We found we could have used a second sewing machine. And a second iron. (More about that later.)

We had already put in several hours the weekend before, working late into the night so that we set off the alarm. Now, we were back at it with all the optimism and hope and expectations of a job to be completed. Oh, the naivete!

Oh, no! Is Jenny ripping out a seam again??

It takes two...

We laughed. A lot. We tried not to jinx ourselves, but failed.

Instead of saying how well things were going, we learned to say, "We are farther than we've ever been."

We sang songs from The Music Man: "Sew a little, rip a little, sew a little, swear a little, rip rip rip, sew a little, rip a little more..."

We learned a lot. Some of it the hard way.

The tricky machine

We learned that we needed to examine each piece of fabric for flaws. Next time, before we cut it out at the store.

We learned that lining dupioni with itself is the best choice.

We learned that the machine is tricky, and sometimes the spool will hop off the machine, or the thread will come un-threaded from the needle.

It takes two people to manage this machine.

We learned that having the real Stephanie present was better than her mini-me, but having both of them was necessary.

More to come!

The lining

So Far, Sew Good?

Today was a day of practice, and we practiced doing lots of things wrong in hopes that we'd make all of our mistakes at once.

What sorts of mistakes?? Well, let us tell you:

We thought that the pretty, shimmery, fancy-shmancy tulle would make a lovely underlining, and judging by our test attempt, the tulle thought so as well.

The little strip of sewn-together dupioni and tulle seemed to suggest that we were on the right track, until we tried it on a larger scale for the actual dress.

After Stephanie pinned and cut all of the appropriate pieces, we discovered that the tulle was too stretchy and it puckered.  Sigh.  The tulle and dupioni had to be ripped apart.

But not to worry, we had plenty of leftover netting that was anxious for a new purpose!

The unassuming, not-so-shimmery netting sewed up nicely with the dupioni for the test strip.

Stephanie was back at the table pinning and cutting the new underlining pieces.

But, upon sewing a larger piece for the dress we discovered the netting was too stretchy and it puckered.  Double sigh. The netting and dupioni had to be ripped apart.

Right sides, wrong sides, side backs, and backsides...

While struggling to decipher pattern lingo we managed to sew two pieces together inside out and backwards.  We also cut out at least one piece incorrectly.

And then we discovered that we are not the only ones who make mistakes. 

The dupioni we had cut for the train has a noticeable run all the way across it.  Luckily, we can use the piece for the lining (not to be confused with the underlining, at least I think they shouldn't be confused).  But we definitely need more dupioni.

The lace we intended to use for the straps has odd imperfections all the way through it.  At first we thought it was dirt, and then we concluded it was burn marks, and finally we decided to buy more.

The next batch wasn't any better.  But it will get used, somewhere!  Perhaps on the bottom of the dress... or as a table decoration... or perhaps we can get even more of it and...

Inch by Inch, Yard by Yard

Sew a little, rip a little, sew a little rip a little...

We had a busy Saturday of dress making. We changed the design yet again, and needed to make another test dress to see how this would all fit together.

The test dress fabric was more similar to the real dress, but still not quite the same. We are down to only three patterns to meld together, so I guess we're making progress!

I feel we're getting close to a final product, but the back will be changing yet again!

Cutting out the pieces.

It's amazing how much material goes into a wedding dress. It's good to have so many tables to be able to lay everything out.

The train pieces that need to be laid out

Lengthening the pattern.

Funny story... After returning from lunch, we found out we'd sewn the dress together forgetting two whole pattern pieces! We cut them apart, and sewed the missing pieces in.

The dress was already big without them!

 Now we need to figure out the back.

Creating the pattern for the keyhole back

Having the actual bride in attendance for the dress making was also an improvement. We still brought her mini-me with us and she came in handy for display purposes and tailoring the back.

 Still working out the back details.

 

Ruching

 Ruching a panel on the front adds interest and seems easier than I'd expected.

What to do in the back?