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.