It’s Official

The knot has been tied! As you can see from the pic, Robin and I are officially husband and wife. Either that or we just like skipping around in wedding wear in poppy fields for sport :) Thank you so much to all of you who sent messages of love and wedding wishes for the 7th June. And thank you to those of you who were actually at the wedding for helping make it an utterly unforgettable day- I only hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

What a whirl. The day itself rushed past at blurry speed, especially the ceremony, which was held the remains of an old Norman building called the Lost Village of Dode, with candles absolutely everywhere and straw carpeting the floor and the heady smell of lavender in the air…

We’d kept the venue a secret from the guests- I only wish I could have seen their reaction as they alighted from our wedding minibuses…
Then, we all headed to Nettlestead Place, a doomsday manor house with amazing gardens, for the wedding “feast”.

In the evening there was dancing and merrymaking courtesy of the most amazing trio of Tudor minstrels, Diabolus, who never wavered in their Elizabethan diction. I remember complimenting their leader (see the pic below) on his amazing hat. “I thank you, Mistress, ’tis of mine own manufacture” he replied, with satisfaction.

Hettie, as you don’t need me to tell you, was a marvellous bridesmaid and looked simply splendid.

More posting on how we made our outfits will follow very soon :)

I’d rather Charleston

Guess what I’ve been doing over the past week or so? Sewing frenetically, and the result is that Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress is officially finished. You can see Hettie modelling it at a grand trying on session chez nous this weekend in the pictures here and getting into that Charleston vibe. Personally I think the stripey socks set it off beautifully :)

Quick Update

This is just a quick update on Hettie’s Bridesmaid’s dress, before I run to catch a coach down to Kent for the weekend… Because this is written in haste, I haven’t really tweaked the overdress on the dummy so that it hangs right, but here it is:

At the moment, the finished skirt is only pinned to the sash facing (which you can’t see) which is thin cotton and interfacing. The bodice shoulder and side seams have been sewn as hairline seams. I realised that one layer of fabric in the bodice was probably going to be too sheer, so I’ve made two bodices out of the same fabric -one will be the lining- and at the moment they are pinned together inside each other at the neck edge. The dress doesn’t have a sash yet- the bumpy fabric round the middle is the hefty seam allowance I’ve left on the bodice for adjustments…

Another view:

The fabric for the underslip has arrived from Farmhouse Fabrics, all tied up with a ribbon!

So, discerning readers, here are the burning issues which I’ll be mulling over while I’m away. Your artistic input, is, as ever, much appreciated in the comments!

1. How to finish the neck and armhole edges? Satin bias binding? And if so, what colour?

2. The sash, what colour and what fabric? Perhaps to match the neck and armhole binding?

I’m forever hemming petals

I’m so grateful for all the kind words of encouragement I receive on this blog, and most recently for the comments and emails in response to my post A shower of petals where I asked you all for advice on how to hem large semi-circular crepe de chine silk petals cut on the bias without [...]

Those about to dye salute you

This may look like an industrial size portion of Strawberry jelly, but is in fact a tub full of Dylon cold water dye in shade Tahiti Rose (plus cold fix and salt) poised and waiting to gobble up the six metres of silk crepe de chine which is going to be Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress.
Scary stuff. I wanted to get a very pale pink, and was terrified of getting a pink too vibrant. A tin of dye does 250g of fabric, and I dyed about 600g of fabric using about half a tin of dye. I lowered the damp silk in, and then 20 seconds later after stirring frantically and tearing off my rubber gloves because I couldn’t handle the silk properly (luckily my hands are pink anyway!) I lifted it out and put it in a bath full of cold water to rinse:

Then I looped it up and left it to dry over the bath. The colour is darker when wet, and if it dries and is too pale, I can always dye it again:

But more by luck than by judgement, the result is a lovely light pink. Here’s the dry result, freshly ironed (the camera flash has washed it our a tiny bit):

So now to the cutting…

A whiter shade of pale

I finally splashed out and bought the entire sample pack from fabric supplier Whaleys of Bradford. Whaleys specialise in fabric for dyeing, natural fabrics and fabrics for use in the theatre. So, basically, any fabric as long as it’s white, or shades of. With a few blacks thrown in. Which is all well and dandy for a Bridal dress :)

The swatches (of which there are far more than those shown above) are an education. I never realised there were quite so many different kinds of fabric. There’s some really interesting ones in there that have me dreaming up new projects, but all in good time, all in good time…

So, six metres of heavy silk crepe de chine arrived from Whaleys yesterday. It’s glorious. I realise that a photo of white fabric is pretty low on excitement, but you can see the glorious soft sheen the silk has:

It has a hot (or cold) date with some pink cold water dye (I couldn’t find pale pink silk crepe de chine without paying more in shipping from the US than the cost of the fabric, and even the necessary swatches alone would have set me back a ridiculous flat shipping fee). When it’s pink it’s destined to be the outer layer of Hettie’s Bridesmaid dress. The fine cotton for the underslip of Hettie’s dress is coming from the US, from Farmhouse Fabrics, along with trimmings. (Don’t you just love the word trimmings?) The skirt of the underslip will have a an overlay of this embroidered tulle which comes from ebay store Lindy Laces:

This is pale gold on ivory. I also bought some in silver on white and couldn’t decide between the two, but with Hettie’s help we’ll go for the pale gold- it does look more antique and less glittery.

Hettie came to try on her test dress at the weekend- thanks, Hettie! I think we just about got it to fit after a few adjustments! I was so concerned with fitting it I forgot to take any pictures- sorry about that. I guess the finished dress will be even more of a surprise!

A shower of petals

When I sketched the original design for Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress, I imagined the skirt as a shower of petals. Which is all very well and poetic but as I was sketching merrily away I didn’t think in too much detail about how to accomplish that petal effect!

Luckily, somewhere I remembered having seen a similar skirt (which may have been what subconsciously inspired me to draw it in the first place). A little leafing through a few books and I came across this sketch of a dress from 1921-22, by the mighty Vionnet in from Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 2 (1860-1940):

Isn’t that lovely? Has anyone tried making it? I did play around for a while with the pattern piece for the skirt of this dress (to the right) and some muslin on much smaller than life-size scale, but it didn’t really work out for me. The finished result had a lot less movement and fullness that I was expecting. The movement was all in the very edges of the petals, whereas I want the whole skirt to move. Also, I don’t really want to get involved with setting in all those triangular points at the waistline! So, I’ve decided to cheat to try to achieve a similar effect.

The first scheme was to make the skirt out of a series of semi-circles, overlapping them in a line, and gathering them along the top so there is a lot of fullness:

But the gathering would anchor the petals together so that I might as well just use one gathered piece of fabric with a scalloped edge. Back to the drawing board. How about more circular shape pieces, stitched to each other a little at the side like Vionnet’s dress and gathered across the top?

I got as far as mocking that one up out of muslin. And it didn’t look that great. Finally:

Each semi-circle has a line of running stitches across the top, then is machined part of the way to the next petal at the side. Then, each individual piece is gathered, the side edges are turned apart and the result if positioned on the sash facing. This works better.

Now, can anyone help with any tips for hemming a semi-circle made out of a crepe de chine type fabric? Are there any shortcuts?!?

Right, now to make a proper test dress to try on Hettie!

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?)

 

 

A rose by any other name

I had a fairly dispiriting traipse round a few fabric stores in London last Friday, looking for wedding outfit fabric, and emerged, uncharacteristically, completely empty handed. (I think I may be losing the ability to shop in real time and space- I need to be able to sit comfortably with a cup of coffee and take my time, concentrating and honing in on exactly what I want and price checking merrily away in cyberspace, rather than scrumming on down on Oxford Street in a city not specially noted for its high level of customer service…)

I was particularly on the look out for a beautiful fabric flower to fasten the sash of Hettie’s bridemaid’s dress, but all the ones I found were kind of cheap and plasticky looking, even when they weren’t either made of plastic or cheap. And the ones that did look even vaguely like real flowers turned out to be made of paper and had to be treated with kid gloves accordingly.

Finally, we were in a florist’s shop at the weekend discussing wedding flowers, and spotted a whole host of gorgeous silk flowers. The florist, Bernadette, helped me pick one out. The one we bought is above, and look how nicely they wrapped it up (it was a lot less crumpled looking before being transported back to Oxford on the coach)!

Messing about with muslin

Yesterday I spent some time draping the underslip for Hettie’s bridesmaid’s dress on my cranky dressform dummy. Now, here’s the dress design again:

I thought it would be easier if the underslip simply pulled on over the head. It has a low drop waist, and a full gathered skirt to give the overdress the right amount of volume and that late 1920s shape.

Because the underslip is designed to show a bit under the dress, and because it has to pull over the head, I didn’t use darts on the bodice. Instead I cut it on the bias to give it some stretch.

I simply worked in a muslin fabric (which, Hettie, is not the material the finished dress will be made of!) draping and smoothing and pinning it directly onto the dummy, drawing cutting lines on with a felt tip pen and then cutting the pieces. I think you can see my pen markings in the back pic on the left:

 

Then I folded the pieces in half down the middle and neatened them up until they were symmetrical, and sewed them together. The seams are on the outside as the dress is on the dummy in the pics.

The skirt was very easy. It is made of two rectangles the same size (the width of the fabric, 45″ by 30″ in depth) seamed at the sides and then gathered to fit the drop waist. I’ve left it long to adjust the hem length later.

Between the bias cut camisole and the skirt I think there will be a pretty insertion, like a strip of lace (probably stretch lace) or ribbon, etc. But at the moment I’ve just put a thin strip of muslin in.

Here is the finished muslin mock up of the slip- front on the left, back on the right.

 

And suddenly the dress starts to begin to live! Now, all you experienced sewers, I have a couple of questions. I wonder if anyone can help in the comments?

• Would a cotton batiste fabric work for this and sit correctly round the torso when cut on the bias?
• Can I use a French seam for the side seams on the bodice, or will they distort over a curve?