Friday, November 28, 2008

Sewing today

I spent some time this AM and PM sewing on my dress. I felt like I was spinning my wheels for awhile this AM. It actually started last night with sewing the front bodice and back bodice to skirt pieces. Both top and bottom have darts that are somewhat unusual angles and placements. It is important to mark these darts carefully and noticeably. When you attach the bodice to the skirt, the darts need to line up.

My dress fabric is rather loosely woven and slightly slippery. The markings were better marked on one piece than the other, thus requiring me to make sure that the darts on both sides of the center front matched up. All of this created a challenge for matching top to bottom at waistline. Susan Khalje (sp) on some of her sewing shows talked about breaking seams up into parts to allow for getting pieces to align correctly. So I followed her techniques and stitched the darted part first, then continued stitching from the darts to the side seams.

Here are photos of the back and front showing the darts alignment.

After doing this, I basted the side seams and back seams to try on for fitting. This fabric as I noted above is loosely woven and drapey. I found that I needed to take a deeper dart at the armhole and deeper darts in the back darts as well. It is interesting that the lining unit fit well without the deeper darts in the front armhole but I did think that I needed to take deeper darts in the back for the lining as well. This clearly reinforces the need to fit both lining and fabric units before attaching due to the variance in the weight, body and hang of the fabric.

I am also deviating from the pattern instructions for attaching the collar and the lining, particularly since I am using a full lining instead of just lining the bodice. Not only that, but their instructions for attaching the collar just does not make since and not as sewing efficient as I think they could be.

I really thought that this dress would go together quickly. Again because of extras that I have done and working striving for perfection, this is going slower than I had thought or planned. More photos and progress report later.

2 comments:

  1. I can't wait to see the photos. I'm so glad you did get some time to spend sewing today! It sounds like you are really taking care to produce a well-constructed garment, and that is time very well spent!

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  2. I think that if you did by the Janome cover stitch machine, you should get the one with two width options. You'd definitely grow out of the other model quickly.

    I can't wait to see this dress when it's finished.

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