Finished: Jade Anna Dress

It has been a hectic few weeks with travelling and train strikes and a presentation and birthdays and a competition.  I have multiple finished things to share, but let's cut to the main event, shall we?

Guys, the Jade Anna dress is done.

Apologies to Jacqueline

This is Jacqueline.

Jacqueline is a Brother 1034D four-thread serger, and a hugely valuable tool in making ballroom costumes.  A serger isn't necessary for sewing clothes of any kind and there are several tasks which sergers cannot do (buttonholes, zippers . . .), but they excel at sewing stretch fabrics, sewing light fabrics, and sewing quickly.  Since sewing stretch and light fabrics on a deadline is the majority of my sewing, I find Jacqueline invaluable.

I Went to London

I took the eurostar to London for a short vacation.  I visited St. Paul's Cathedral.

I looked at all the artwork and learned about the history of this cathedral of the people.  I didn't take pictures, because that wasn't allowed inside.

I spent one more making slides, since my field has kind of an odd relationship with the concept of time off.

Ballroom Sewing: Is it worth it?

Is sewing my own ballgowns worth it?

I have asked myself that question a lot while frustrated with the jade anna dress.  In one way, the answer is always yes.  Around here, a new, made-to-measure ballgown will cost between 1500 and 3000 euros.  Some portion of that range depends on how the dress is assembled, as multi-layer skirts with lots of bias-cut pieces eat up expensive fabrics at a rapid pace.  The majority of the difference though comes from the decoration of a dress.  Appliques, fringes, sequins, and rhinestones are typically hand-applied to a gown, so the dress price reflects the hours someone spent gluing individual pieces of fringe or rhinestones to the dress.  It isn't a task that requires a high level of training, so the basics of decorating are not hard to learn, and decorating a costume yourself in one area in which you could save money.

January 2015 Swap Report and Finished: Swap Bags

The world postal systems turned out to be remarkably efficient at the beginning of the month, so I am the lax one in not reporting sooner on the results of the January 2015 Geek and Nerd Swap, themed Imaginary Worlds.  Let me put that right.

That time-consuming prima donna, the jade anna dress, became top priority in January because I had a competition I needed to wear it to and because it took far longer than I anticipated (see previous post for details on the most recent ripping and resewing).  The date of the competition happened to be the ship date for this swap.  It was not my finest example of time-management.  So in the midst of the ripping and resewing, when my sewing machine and serger seemed to have taken up permanent resident on the dining room table and green threads had attached themselves to everything in the apartment, I made a project bag.

The frog fabric was purposefully purchased for this bag, as my spoilee collects frog-related things.  The purple was part of the fat quarters/scraps I purchased to bolster my stash in January.  I followed Shannon's helpful tutorial, adapting it only to make the purple strip narrower and to have an opening on each side for the drawstrings.  The entire time I was sewing this, I remembered how pleasant sewing with cotton is.  It doesn't stretch!  It doesn't shift!  It doesn't bunch up!  It stays where you put it!

Sometimes One Must Rip

My January swap has ended and the first two competitions of the new year are done, so let's have an update on the projects that consumed the month, shall we?  First up, the jade anna dress.  When last we heard from this project, I was crying on the bathroom floor and the dress looked like this:

 Let's list what isn't working here, shall we?  First off, the godets are clearly not correct, as the fabric is pulling in tightly just below the lycra.  This was because I tried to use a narrower triangle for the godet (I had used quarter circles in the past, but it had seemed overkill at the time) and the godet apparently had a smaller opening angle than the space I was setting it into.  The overskirt would have to come off.

Tiers and Tears: Jade Anna Skirts

With bodice assembled, the first, finicky par of the dress is finished.  I then move on to making the skirts.  This step is mostly difficult because of the volume--ballgown skirts are huge.  The amount of hugeness varies according to current trends, but bigger almost always has a place.  This means that making one requires cutting several meters of organza into half-circles and sewing some very long seams.

My dress's skirt has two major components, which I call the underskirt and the overskirt.  The underskirt is primarily responsible for all the volume here, and I built mine in a set of three tiers.  The first tier is a stretch mesh yoke (not the technical term, but that's what I call it) that attaches directly to the leotard at the high hip.

 The second tier is one full circle of organza, sewn to the mesh yoke.

The third tier is two more layers of organza.  The inner one is 1.5 circles, while the outer one is 2 full circles.  This was a little experiment of mine in producing more volume.  The pink grapefruit dress also has a tiered underskirt with two layers at the bottom, each 2 full circles.  I found that since both layers were the same size, they tended to nest into each other and weren't as big as I had wanted.  I hope that making these two layers different sizes, they will stand out away from each other more.

Organza is a fairly stiff fabric, so it does a decent job of holding up a skirt on its own.  More volume normally comes from stiffening the hemline some more, and I use 77 mm crinoline for that purpose in this dress.

So I spend hours with a giant puff-ball next to my serger as I attach the crinoline and finish the edge of the organza, and then a couple hours more with a bigger puff-ball next to my sewing machine as I sew the other edge of the crinoline in place.  I spent the entire time murmuring endearments to my serger, because my serger is fast.  Doing this without a serger would take three times as long.

Then I had an underskirt, and so I moved onto making the godets to insert in the dress itself.

Here is where my tale takes a dark turn.  The godets are made of satin chiffon, a lovely, slippery, easily frayed fabric that gave me fits.  It took me forever to cut out eight godets, edge them, insert them into the appropriate slits, sew the edges together, and hem the bottom.  This was happening in the two days before I left for my last and biggest competition of 2014.  At 2 p.m. the day before I was to leave, on a day I had taken off from work so I could finish this, I finished that hem and hung the dress in my bathroom to evaluate it.

I had this.

I sat down on my bathroom floor and cried.  Both the bodice and the overskirt had ended up taking much longer to put together than I had planned for, and the overskirt looked like crap.  I couldn't wear this dress like this, and there was no time to fix it.  I wore my trusty pink grapefruit dress for my last competition of the year, and banished the jade anna dress to the closet to think about its problems.

I am thinking of solutions for those problems already.  This dress and I and my seam ripper have a date after Christmas.  I believe this dress can be awesome, but I have to do it justice to the best of my abilities, and perhaps create a few new abilities in the process.

Fears of the Self-Taught

In case it isn't obvious from my approach to sewing, I am almost entirely self-taught in the ways of the seamstress.  My mother is quite capable of sewing garments and taught me the basics of using a sewing machine, but beyond that I sorted things out on my own.  The techniques I use are picked up from several places: my mother, a most useful book from Kwik-Sew on making swimsuits, the few blogs that mention sewing costumes, a few fashion sewing youtube channels or other sewing tutorials, whatever I can reverse-engineer by studying other people's costumes, and whatever procedures make sense after I think things through.  I am very aware of my ignorance, and it means that there is always a bit of trepidation when I pull out the expensive fabric and start slicing it to ribbons to make the bodice.

New Sewing Project

The pink grapefruit dress has served me well since May, but the time has come to switch to a new dress.  My body shape has changed over the past year as I continue to exercise and dance, and the pink grapefruit dress is now a bit loose through the bodice and too long.  So an order was made to Chrisanne, and this lovely box arrived on my doorstep.

Preview

Guys, I have so many things to talk about, but the to-do list is ten miles long and looks unlikely to change for at least another two weeks.  Here are a few hints of what's to come, when things are a bit more under control.

Back to pumpkins

Belgium's poor attempt at summer seems to be giving up on being anything but fall, and the back-to-school season is in full swing.  Things have been hectic.  I have participated in congresses for the two dance federations I mostly work with, one of which included a competition.  I currently am balancing three projects at work, which is mostly okay except for days when I spend 5.5 hours in meetings to present 35 of my own slides and provide back-up to a student's presentation.  That was Friday.  I sent out my swap package for the August edition of the 2014 Geek and Nerd Swap Saturday morning, and I look forward to sharing the details of those projects once my swap partner has received them.

In the meantime, though, I am returning to my small stash of works-in-progress to see what I can make progress on.  The latin dress is stalled somewhat, mostly because I don't particularly enjoy the pattern alterations I am trying to sort out.  Standard dress patterns don't fit well enough or look right for dancing, so alterations must be made.  But I don't feel that I am skilled at it, so I end up making a mock bodice, and then *tweaking the pattern and making another mock bodice, repeat from * until satisfied.

To keep me busy during my commute, now made longer as students in school means buses tend to run late, the pun'kin socks have been restarted.  I ripped them out to start with 72 stitches around and did one less repeat of the cuff pattern.

I wouldn't particularly care for this sort of cuff, since I prefer 1x1 ribbing, but I must admit that it makes sense--the cuff looks like a pumpkin stem.

A Dress Starts with Paper

I have successfully unearthed my sewing table, and therefore been able to start my next sewing project.  It will be a latin dress using the pile of pink lycra I discussed previously.  To me, a dress project begins when I start one of these:

This pile of paper will be the project notebook for this particular dress.  The front page is where I sketch out and make notes about the different parts of the dress: what the front and back look like, a rough idea of how the underskirts and leotard will be put together, what fabrics will be used where, and some idea of what decorations or stoning patterns I plan to use.  I'm not a great artist, but the sketches capture my ideas and give me a sense of what pattern alterations I will need to do.  The plans for this dress are fairly basic, since it will have two only parts, dress and leotard, and I have made no plans for stoning patterns.  Below you can see some of the sketches I've made for other ballgown projects, which were more involved.

Finished: Triforce Project Bag

My swap partner also expressed an interest in a project bag, so I decided to sew a small one.  Sewing a bag or pouch takes a lot less time for me than just about every other project I take on, and since I had already decided go with a Legend of Zelda-themed box, I knew how I could make the bag go with it.

A Triforce Bag.

The Triforce is pieced loosely following a tutorial I found on Diary of a Quilter, and the fabrics are 100% cotton quilting fabrics purchased at le Marché St. Pierre.  The main exterior fabric in particular reminds me of the background in the Temple of Light of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  The bag pattern comes from this tutorial, though I made a couple of minor alterations.  The largest of those was piecing the front of the bag to include my Triforce panel.  I also left two openings for drawstrings, one on each side, and only added interfacing in the bag's base, as I felt interfacing on the sides would make the bag hard to pull shut.

I think I was right on that last point.  The bag is a bit hard to close, though I expect it will get softer with washing.  I also think I should have used sturdier ribbon ties instead of fabric ones made of the quilting cotton.  Still, the bag turned out nicely, and it is big enough to hold a sock-in-progress or other small project.

Now I just need to make myself one, so I am not hauling my projects around in ripped plastic bags in my backpack.

New Project Plans

While I love the pink grapefruit dress, it has dominated my crafting time for a solid, hectic month now, and I am ready to move on.  I also feel the need to limit the amount of storage space I need for fabric, which means the images below are not ideal.

Project 1.

That pile is about 1.5 yards and many good-sized scraps of pink lycra, the remains of two earlier dress projects (since I hadn't learned to estimate yardage for a dress accurately).  I want to turn it into a latin dress, as a way of practicing a few dress making and decorating skills without needing to buy several more yards of skirt fabrics.

Project 2.

I realize that this doesn't look like a project or pile of fabric.  It looks like a ballgown.  This dress was my first ballgown when I resumed competing about a year ago, and it doesn't work for me any more.  Over a year of dancing, I have lost some weight, and this dress no longer fits well.  I could probably deal with cutting down the dress, though it would be a serious pain, but this dress has some stylistic problems that make it not worth it for me now.  The waistline of this dress means it gives the wearer a lovely hourglass figure (my waist looked really, really small in this dress) and it can hide a lot of hip and rear under the skirt.  Now that I don't have the same figure, the dress just makes me look short and a bit squat.  It is therefore hanging unused in my closet, taking up space.

This dress has been and is posted for sale, but I haven't had any offers and there is a price floor below which it makes more sense to dismantle the dress to reclaim the rhinestones and yards of fabric as raw materials.  Well, it makes more sense to my sort of logic.  If nobody takes it before I finish project 1, this dress will undergo some major surgery.

Finished: Pink Grapefruit Dress

It's all done and ready for dancing.  Rhinestones don't photograph well in my opinion, but hopefully you can see that there is more detailing of the roses on the side panels of the dress as well as the changes I described in the previous post.  This dress currently boasts Swarovski padparadsha ss20, crystal AB ss20, and a small amount of crystal AB ss30 as well as crystal AB sew-on stones.  It also has a few gross of Chrisanne's radiance ss16 crystals on there.

Now I am ready for it to be just a dress and not a project any more.  On to the next thing!

Dozens and dozens of Stones

The final step to have the pink grapefruit dress ready for competition was to add more rhinestones.  I don't mind gluing on rhinestones; it is not difficult, and my husband is pretty good at helping with it to cut down on the time needed.  I have found that designing with rhinestones is an art that I most certainly haven't mastered, and I tend to underestimate how many stones a project needs.  That happened here, and now I am finishing it with more stones.

My approach to stoning is low-tech.  I use no-hotfix stones, which means no glue has been preapplied to the little rocks.  I pour the stones onto plates or into shallow bowls, one per type of stone.  My dress is on my duct tape dress form, which I like to use for two reasons.  For one, the dress form gives me a fairly stable backing to push against as I am placing the stones.  For two, it means the fabric is already stretched as it will be when I wear the dress.  I worry about gluing stones onto unstretched fabric and then having them pop off when the dress is worn.

The glue I am using for this project is Chrisanne's jewel glue, which I find rather thin and slow to dry.  My approach is therefore to place several small dots of glue and let them get tacky. . .

 . . . and then place each stone on a glue dot with a pair of tweezers.

A friendly tip--I advise anyone out there doing this to find a pattern of laying down glue dots such that you aren't resting your hand on the recently glued section to access the next part.

The pins you see in some of my photos were to give me visual guidelines for my stoning.  I did not want to be too precise since the goal was to have stones scattered across the dress, but I had pins at the top hemline to help me space out specific sizes of stones as I added the straight line there, and the ones at the bottom were to indicate how far down on the dress I wanted the higher density of stones to reach.

That's it for the back of the dress.  The front central section needs similar treatment, and then the rose outlines on the side fronts and backs need to have missing stones replaced and extra details added.  Then this dress will be ready for competition!

Now with more skirt

 Before:

After:

I am not sure it shows well in these photos, but the dress now has an additional ten meters or so of hemline under there.  I am very glad to have that taken care of.  Even with my serger going over a previously serged seam, sewing three layers of organza together was a pain.  The fabric was slippery and would drop pins and slip apart and slip out of under the presser foot, and when it was all done I had four places where the new layer had not been sewn to the dress and needed to be redone.  But it is all together now.

This operation does not seem to have done anything weird to the length of the overskirt relative to the underskirt, thank goodness.  No additional hemming is required.  Now onto the stoning!

Pink Grapefruit Progress

New straps?  Check.

I also discovered that one of the old straps was about an inch (2 cm) longer than the other.  These things happen when one sews in a hurry.  The new ones are the same length.

Ballgown in Three Days

This is the project that ate my month of May.

 

I am an amateur ballroom dancer, and I make my own costumes.  This is my current competition dress, and it has a bit of a story behind it.  My competition season had all of its biggest events in late April and May.  I had been planning on making a new dress by then, but the fabric that I had ordered hadn’t arrived in time.  However, there was a particular color of fabric I had been stalking for a couple of months, and some of it went on clearance in mid-May.  I splurged and bought the fabric to start making a dress.