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.