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!

To Hat or not to Hat?

That is the question that has been causing a certain amount of debate in wedding circles as the date of our wedding in June hoves ever nearer. To wear or not to wear? And, if to wear, how to find a hat that suits? In an effort to be helpful, but probably to complicate the buying process still further, I’ve dug out my copy of Dressing Smartly, by Mildred Graves Ryan, a sage tome of sartorial wisdom published in 1956, when a lady wasn’t considered properly dressed without a hat and gloves. Ms. Ryan appears very keen on hats herself: the photo of her on the book’s jacket show her sporting a trim number, and she devotes a whole chapter to Becoming Hats:

Not only does a hat put the finishing touch to a smart outfit, but it also serves as a lovely frame for the face, adding a flattering touch to the facial features. However, it is sometimes difficult to find the hat that seems exactly right for the outfit and becoming to you. But don’t buy one unless it is. With the great variety in style, size and shape there has to be one that is perfect. Keep trying. If the choice gets confusing, stop. Wait until you can analyze the situation objectively. Sometimes it is the way that you place the hat on your head that is unattractive. Shift the position until it is comfortable and flattering to wear.

Here are Ms. Ryan’s cardinal rules for hat selection, based upon principles of proportion:
“The problem of selecting a hat is also complicated by the fact that it must be considered in relation to the figure as well as the face. A hat is often most becoming to the face but gives a very distorted illusion to the figure. You know what happends when a large hat is worn by a tiny person.

It is also well to consider the profile when selecting a hat. It is important that the side view should be pleasing.

To add length to the face and figure, wear hats with brims that turn upward. Feathers or decoration with an upswept air will keep the eye moving in a vertical direction. Hats worn with a slight diagonal tilt will have a slenderizing and flattering effect.

To shorten the face and figure, wear hats with drooping brims. Sometimes hats in bright contrasting colours or with horizontally placed decoration will stop the eye, decreasing the apparent height of the figure.

Hats worn straight on the head are often difficult to wear. They produce a straight line across the forehead which shortens and broadens the face.

Care must be taken in choosing a close-fitting hat. If the crown is smaller that the widest part of the face the features will seem more prominent. If the crown is too large, a top-heavy, grotesque look is achieved. It is very important that good proportion exists between the hat, the face and the figure.

It is also important that the rules of repetition and contrast be remembered. An off-the-face hat above a tired sagging face will of course emphasize the drooping lines. A feather jutting out above a prominent nose will accentuate the feature. A pill box hat worn by a round face will increase the apparent rotundity of the face.”

What a lot to think about- no wonder the humble hat has fallen out of favour…

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?)

 

 

Awards

I owe a huge thank you to Mary Beth at the Stitchery, and also somewhat belatedly to Thornberry (sorry- it’s taken me a while to accumulate 10 blogs to list!) for awarding me the following badge:

Thornberry also awarded me this award:

Thank you so much to both of you! By accepting both awards, I have to award them on to 10 more blogs that are deserving worthy. And that’s tricky, as I’m sure there are a whole host of excellent blogs out there that I don’t know about, but I don’t have as much time as I’d like to surf blogs and thinking of even 10 tricky! Apparently I can nominate people who have already received this award.

For a whole host of different reasons, I nominate the following blogs:
Moxietonic

Moving Hands

Thornberry back again!

And The Stitchery back again!

Fashion Incubator

Annika’s Atelier

A Dress a Day

The Costumer’s Guide

Wee Wonderfuls

Magik Quilter

Keep up the good work- and consider yourselves tagged! :)

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 below:

 

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- the front:

and the back:

 

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?

Wrestling for dummies

Today Hettie’s measurements for her Bridesmaid’s dress arrived in the mail! Thank you, Rose, for taking Hettie’s measurements, thank you to Hettie for standing so still despite being cold and tickley and thank you to Auntie Sue for posting them! These were the original measurement sheets I cobbled together and sent:

 

So, armed with the measurement sheets I spent a while this evening wrestling with one of our two dummies. One is currently “occupied” so I spent a while with this one, which is basically made of a stiff wire mesh:

This dummy has a few… eccentricities. She’s missing a metal part that keeps the actual torso still. And one of her legs keeps falling out and then she plunges drunkenly towards starboard and has to be caught before she hits the deck. It’s also impossible to manipulate her wire to get any kind of symmetrical finish and bits of the mesh poke outwards and play havoc with achieving accurate measurements. But as she’s a bit sensitive and advanced in years its best not to mention it, really…

Finally, I covered her with an old stretchy top and fine tuned the measurements by stuffing in bits of fabric. I still need to play around a bit more, but then tomorrow I’ll have a go at draping fabric on her:

 

Suitable for a Lady

Remember yesterday’s cryptic older ebay arrival? All is revealed. In its original brown paper envelope is Cornwell’s Self-fitting System of Dress Cutting, patented 1873, revised 1876:

The system promises to contain everything one needs to achieve a perfect fit in all manner of “ladies’, misses’ and children’s dresses, cloaks, basques and postillions”:

The principles of this system were first thought of by Miss Elmira Harroun (now Mrs Cornwell) at 16 years of age. Her first chart was a rough piece of pasteboard, on which the method of fitting the shoulder and the darts were marked in ink, a puzzle which no one could figure out until Mr. Cornwell, a practical business man full of inventive faculties, discerning the great value of that unburnished diamond in his wife’s cherished pasteboard, undertook to make it so plain that “he who runs may read”.

(Hope Mr Cornwell didn’t marry Elmira for her pasteboard…)

The system comprises a back section, a front section, and a separate sleeve, dated 1881.
The substantial card pieces are a riot of scales, punched holes and high Victorian over-ornamentation and advertisement:

There is also a small instruction booklet, every page of which offers a plea for lady canvassers and agents to sell the system:

There is no article so suitable for a lady to sell, and nothing that yields so much profit to the agent. Lady school teachers can make four or five times as much in this business as in teaching, be more independent and have much healthier employment… If you do not care to engage in this business please induce some smart lady of your acquaintance to write us about this profitable agency.

As if you needed any further persuasion, the booklet also contains 10 pages of letters from satisfied customers:

Dear Sir: - I have found your chart everything it is represented to be. By it I can cut and fit a dress in bed; I have done it frequently. I have poor health and cannot do any better at present. I try and sell all I can, and do all I can for it.

Yours and oblige, Sarah J Downs.

(In bed? Can you imagine trying to cut and fit a dress IN BED?!?) And this:

I have used your system ever since I did dressmaking, which is eleven years. I am counted the best dressmaker and cutter. I received first prize for the best fitting dress on the most disagreeable figure that could be found in the City and the State fair…

Mrs Norris Brown, corner first and Macy Street

Pity the poor woman who achieved the dubious distinction of having the most disagreeble figure at the City and State Fair…

I’m fascinated by the idea of an exact mathematical system based on one’s own unique body measurements to produce clothing that fits well, and I’ve always thought dressmaking was halfway between an art and a science. Occasionally I eye up the Lutterloh system which I believe was invented in the 1930s and is still going strong today, but the price tag puts me off. Check out the video and site promoting the system here. It all looks suspiciously effortless.

I’m hoping that using Cornwell’s system I might eventually end up looking like I’ve stepped out of a painting by Tissot. That last sentence was a very unsubtle lead-in to allow myself to indulge showing you some Tissot paintings. Obviously I can’t bring myself to just show you one, so I’ll show you three in chronological order that are contemporary to the Cornwell system:

Lilacs, 1875

 

Portrait of Miss Lloyd, 1876

The Ball, 1878

I can’t wait to see if Cornwell’s system will deliver what it promises- I’ll keep you all posted!