April 4, 2008...8:25 pm
Leonardo and the fabric of the mind
When I lie in bed at night nowadays with my eyes shut I’m manipulating fabric in the dark, twisting it into every possible dimension. I wish I was a Leonardo because I am no fabric architect, and my imagination can only take me so far. I wish I had the mental engineering skills of the Leonardo who had invented the parachute, a design vindicated 500 years after he came up with the idea in the first place. But designs that work in a night-time slide into slumber don’t translate onto paper, shapes that worked on paper don’t drape onto a dummy, and things work on a dummy that I never would have thought would work at all.
I’ve been working on the outer layer of Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress, or rather, the overdress, which has a working wrapover front and short cap sleeves. (I appreciate it would be quicker to find a commercial pattern that works, but no pattern I’ve come across seems quite… right.) I wanted to achieve as few seams as possible on the bodice section of this dress, but that would be a lot easier if the bodice didn’t have to extend to form the wrapover front. This was closest I could get to how to do it in my head:
The problem, as I’m sure you’re thinking to yourselves, was the grain of the fabric. Ideally for the bodice to hang right the grain should be running parallel to the front neck diagonal edge yet also parallel to the centre back seam. Obviously that’s not possible with no shoulder seam (although I’m sure Leonardo could have made it work) so there will have to be a side seam and a shoulder seam. There will be only one back piece as it will be cut on a fold:
That’s better. So there’s been much draping of muslin over the dummy today, tweaking, pinning, circling the result warily, leaving it, catching it at an angle out of the corner of my eye and adjusting it. And then starting all over again and trying something else. (Generally, this is not how I like to work: I like to get things done, and efficiently!)
The good thing though about working on a 3D model of someone’s measurements is that you can see whether the proportions of a garment work on the figure, whether the amount of fullness or gathering looks good or whether the length of sleeve suits.
After I’d draped the bodice (and inside sash facing), I got to work with a felt pen, marking lines to cut and numbered points to match to hold the gathers in place. Then I removed them and cut the pieces along my pen lines. As I was feeling strong, I decided to make pattern pieces of all pieces made so far, including the underdress, by drawing round the flat muslin pieces onto tracing paper, and overlaying the pieces and tracing through to get all the line lengths to true up.
Below I’m tracing the back. I realise in retrospect it would have made it easier to do this on plain paper rather than on a patterned carpet. What was I thinking?!
All that’s left at the muslin stage is to do the overdress skirt, and I have something in mind for that which means more mental fabric manoeuvres in the dark…
(N.B. Apparently Leonardo was a keen costume designer for the theatre, but hardly any of his designs remain to us. Wouldn’t they have been a sight for sore eyes?)
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