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Bridal Heirlooms, Construction, Sewing Techniques

Wedding Dress

WEDDING DRESS

 

Finally, I’m back and as promised I’ll write about the wedding dress journey.  The bride wanted something simple and considering she lives in Chicago, I determined that we wouldn’t make any style that required any inner corset or boning.  Too many fitting challenges with that and the duct tape mannequin wasn’t working out as I had planned.  I really should have filled it with foam but didn’t have the time.

 

Here is the dress finished.  The bride was on her way outside for pictures before the ceremony.  Unfortunately, the photographer neglected to take the traditional wall portrait pose and this is the closest I have of the dress and my beautiful daughter.  It’s not a great picture, not worthy of the wall portrait, but you can see the dress clearly.

 

It consisted of an underdress made of duchess satin.  I made all my fitting adjustments on this, intending to mold the lace over it.  The bride wanted allover lace, so I chose a wide one that had a nice pattern and border for the skirt, with designs that I could cut apart and applique on the bodice.  Unfortunately, in a moment of insanity, I chose beaded lace….so that as I cut apart the lace for the bodice the beads came apart.  Beads all over the house.  This led to endless hours hand stitching the appliques and replacing the beads.  I think I spent about 600 hours of hand stitching on the lace.  But she loved it and that’s all that counts.  I also made a detachable train out of netting and pearl trim to give the effect of a ghost train.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t show in the picture.

Here are the construction steps:

First I just draped the lace to figure out the placement of the designs and how the skirt would look.  I needed to work from the bottom up and the top down, blending in the laces at the waist, so lace motifs at the waist line to hide the seams was very important.

 

Next, I cut square of lace large enough for the front skirt and the back skirt.  They had to be cut around the motifs and a little larger because I needed to overlap them at the side seams and blend them together.

 

I pinned the skirt pieces over the underdress and draped the side seams.  I pulled the skirt out at the side and pinned the lace in place on each side of the side seams.

 

Next came the hand stitching.  I laid the skirt flat and overlapped the two lace pieces.  I hand stitched around the motifs and cut away the excess on the back.

 

Then I started on the bodice. I cut out the motifs and placed some soft netting on top of the underdress.  I arranged the motifs until I had a design I liked then I took the netting off the mannequin and stitched the motifs to the net using a fell stitch.  I traced the bodice pattern pieces on some medical table paper and put the net on top to insure that the design would maintain the proper shape.  All the hand stitching was done on top of the medical tracing paper.

 

Here, I am working on the back.

 

Here is where I blended the skirt and bodice together to give the dress a seamless appearance.

 

I also devised a method for an offset zipper underneath the bridal loops for extra security.  I’ll have that available in a separate post.

This was the biggest challenge of my sewing life.   There were many panicky moments that I wouldn’t finish in time, but I eventually did and she loved it.  I’m glad it’s done and I’m glad my youngest daughter found the wedding dress of her dreams at Kleinfeld’s for her wedding next November.  She didn’t want to put me through that stress again so instead, I’m making the veil, flower girl dress and a surprise that I can’t tell about yet.

Bridal Heirlooms, Construction, Sewing Techniques

Wedding Update

The bride will be coming home for a fitting next week.  I have the underdress all ready.  I’ll post pictures after next week when she has it on.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there are no major fitting issues.  I’m a little concerned because the duct tape mini-me hasn’t turned out as accurate as I would have liked.

After checking the fit then I just have to sew on the lace.  Appliques on the top, and a lace overskirt.  I bought lace with beads, so it will be a lot of hand sewing.  But working with the lace should be the fun part.

In between working on this, I’ve been tweaking my Baby Bishop pattern and it should be ready for a testing call soon.  I also have an American Girl doll dress in the works also.  It is so nice to get away from wedding stress and work on my patterns and designs.  The business has been put in a holding pattern with the wedding dress project, but I’m still plugging away and I’m anxious to start offering my patterns for sale.

I’m also still waiting for my model to arrive.  I purchased a life-like baby doll from Ashton Drake and it’s taking months to ship it!  Hopefully it will arrive by the August 15th date they promised.

I’ll be back soon with pictures!

Bridal Heirlooms, Construction, Sewing Techniques, Uncategorized

Bridal Mini-Me

I went shopping for a wedding dress with my oldest daughter a few weeks ago.  She lives in Chicago and came home for a shopping expedition.  She didn’t find anything she liked and the shop was really limited in variety as far as different styles go so now I am making her dress.

Since she’s not readily available for fittings, I made a duct tape mannequin of her shape!

It’s something I read about years ago in a Threads magazine and I’ve always wanted to try it.  This was the perfect opportunity.

She put on an old T-shirt and I wrapped her hips in plastic wrap because the shirt wasn’t long enough.  Here is the first layer:

It’s still bumpy and wrinkled which is why a second layer is needed.  This layer is added vertically to help smooth everything out.  It helped a little, but I could quite get the bust area shaped as smoothly as I wanted.  I also think I should have wrapped her tighter, but I was afraid it would be too uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure how long she would be trapped like this.

Next, I marked some horizontal lines up the back over the center back and started cutting it off from the bottom to the neck.

Then I placed it on my regular dress dummy and stuffed it a little to make it firm and stable.  Then I taped up the back to keep it closed.

It definitely needs some tweaking as far as the stuffing goes, so I have to do some more checking against her measurements. Next time I do this though, I would definitely choose a looser T-shirt to get a more definite shape in the bust area and I would wrap a little tighter.  It was a fun project though.

Since daughter was home for the whole weekend, I proceeded to make the muslin for her dress.  I made the alterations that were needed and checked them on daughter, then on the mannequin to see if it would be a good substitute.  It seems to work so far.  I’ll know more in August when she comes home again.  By then I plan to have the underdress done and only the lace work will remain unfinished.

 

Construction, Sewing Techniques

A BIAS TUTORIAL – THE DETAILS MATTER

It’s the annual mad rush to clean out the freezer to make room for the beef quarter coming next week.  So that means pulling out all the chicken carcasses, the chuck steaks and the beef bones I’ve been saving to can some soup and stew.  I spent all day yesterday roasting soup bones and the steaks and making the stock.  Today I chopped and prepped and jarred up the stew.

 

Of course yesterday I nicked the top of my index finger with the knife while cutting up the steaks.  It hurts because it’s right at the tip of my finger.  Now, you might be asking what does this have to do with sewing or smocking.  Well, the cut is on my left finger….and that is my stitching hand.  That little cut put me out of commission all weekend for any kind of stitching.  Very annoying!  You  see, even though I’m left handed, I cut with my right hand…a little quirk that lefties usually demonstrate trying to adjust in a rightie dominated world.

 

Since I can’t sew anything to blog about, I thought I would give a quick tutorial on working with bias strips to make piping.  Specifically, how to stitch gingham or plaid bias strips together seamlessly.

 

Sometimes you want to make a long piece of piping or bias trim, but the size of the fabric you have won’t allow you to cut such a long enough strip on the bias.  The solution is to cut several bias strips and match the plaids when you stitch them together.  I am working on a new doll dress pattern called the Red Checked Picnic Dress.  It’s a version of the dress I made for the Doll’s Day Out fundraiser I talked about here.  I’m still tweaking the pattern but I can show you the bias process.  The width of the fabric that I had leftover for bias strips wasn’t wide enough to make one seamless strip for the belt.

 

The first step is to plan where the seams will be placed.  I didn’t want a seam right in the middle on the front of the dress so I pieced 3 strips together.  This pushes the seams over to the sides making it less noticeable.

 

I chose 3 strips and made sure the design was going in the right direction.  This was a woven check, so the right and wrong sides look the same.

 

Then I slid one strip over the other until the two blended in.  It looked like one continuous strip.  If this is a plaid, make sure all the lines and colors are in the proper order along the whole length.  If you look closely you can see the selvage edge on the top strip.  Other than that the two blend together.

 

 

Without lifting the bias from the table, fold the end of the top strip under along one of the lines in the check or plaid. Finger press to make a crease.  Place it back over the other strip and adjust the pattern to blend in.

 

 

Hold the seam allowance underneath the top strip with a pin to  keep them from shifting and lift up the top bias up so that it’s perpendicular to the one underneath. Use the triangular piece sticking out to hold with the pin.  

 

 

Insert the pin along the crease to hold in place.  Check the pin placement on both sides to make sure it’s going into and coming out of the fabric along the correct line. 

 

 

Stitch together along the crease and you are done!