The muslin

I spent the afternoon transferring my pattern to muslin, to check the fit.  Before I could begin, however, I had to clean up the craft room.  It's really nice to have a whole room dedicated to sewing and crafts, but the kids like to use it, to make crafts like this:

And they tend to leave it in disarray, with a floor covered in this:

That's after I gathered up all the papers and kicked them into a pile.  And uncovered the table top and washed off all of the paint. (All of the water soluble paint, that is.  I didn't take the time to scrub off the crayon.)

That left me with enough space to lay out all of the pattern pieces.  (Speaking of unfinished projects, that painting in the background was from the painting lesson Grandmom gave me before the twins were born.  It's been on the easel for eight years waiting to be finished.)

Each pattern piece had to have the seam allowances added: 1/2" on each seam, with the exception of 1/4" on the neckline, 1" on the side seams to allow for adjustments, and 1 1/2" in the bottom hem.  

This was the most tedious part of the project.  Lucky for me, at this point there are only five pattern pieces, with no facings or lining or pockets or sleeves.  

Just for good measure, I also used the tracing paper to transfer the seam lines and center front markings to the muslin.  

I must say, marking the lines directly on the muslin actually made it easier to cut out all of the pieces.  Except for the fact that I found my sewing scissors have a dull spot on the blades.  Could some of those kids have used them to cut something besides fabric?  

Now that all of the pieces are cut out, I was ready to stitch them together. Only six seams -- sounds pretty quick, right?  Well, it would have been if I didn't have five interruptions.  

I have found that you can never use too many pins when you are fitting the curve on princess seams.  Teeny tiny bites right on top of the line of ease stitching help it go in smoothly, too. 

Which gives a really nice, smooth seam after it is clipped and pressed.  Look, Ma, no tucks!   

Well, I've got to admit, the second seam was just terrible with the fabric pleated and stitched in all the wrong places.  Fortunately, I had sewn over the pins and I put the muslin together with a basting stitch, so it took mere moments to rip out that seam and stitch it again.  I think I forgot to hold the fabric into a curve while I was stitching. 

The back princess seams aren't as curved, and take fewer pins.  

Just the stitch the sides and shoulders together, and .... all done!  

Now comes the moment of truth.  

DOES IT FIT?



Do I have a picture here?




No!  It was awful.  And all of the places where it didn't fit were all of the reasons that I wanted to take this class.  It was way too big in the waist.  The shoulder seams were too high at the neck.  The princess seams in the back needed to be taken in to get rid of a lot of excess fabric.  The seams under the bust needed to be taken in, too, to give a better fit.  So, after using a red pencil to sketch in where I think the front curved pieces should fall, I packed everything up.  I really hope that I can get some help in class on Tuesday to solve all of these problems!

Design #2

Making just one dress is not enough work for a semester-long class!  Consequently, we had to turn in our first set of sketches for Design #2 this week.  Alas, the assignment was given on Thursday and I spent the weekend out of town at my nephew's birthday party. (My time was well-spent: I embroidered initials to help turn 50-cent washcloths into $6 Spidey-scrubbers. Even with just one large initial per cloth and an embroidery machine, getting forty washcloths into and out of an embroidery hoop took some time.) 

I completely forgot to work on the assignment on Monday, so I only have the sketches that I did in class on Tuesday while waiting for help to fit my muslin.

For this assignment, we were to take a vintage pattern and update it.  Here is my assigned inspiration pattern:


The keys points are the flange on the blouse, and the double darts in the skirt.  Here are the designs I turned out:




As you can see, anything with the bow looks rather dated, but a scarf at the neck works well.  (Oops!  Just realized I forgot to color one of the sleeves on dress 1.) I like the second and fourth designs the best.  The rest of this assignment is to make ten more sketches (variations on our best two or three designs from the original twenty) and then make these in half-size.  If the girls had a doll that size, I think I'd do it, but half-size is too big for a doll and too small for a little girl, so I may pass on this assignment!  

We also learned how to make the patterns for the facings and linings for our dresses in class this week.  So I'm actually not making more work for myself by deciding this should be a fully-lined dress. :)  The facing and lining pattern is just a copy of the dress pattern, with the facing being at least two inches wide on any open edge (neck, armholes of sleeveless dresses, button fronts, etc.).  In the back of the neck, however, the facing is made much deeper so that the finished garment has "hanger appeal" and doesn't show the lining.  After drawing in the shape of the facing, the pattern is cut apart, and then seam allowances are added to each piece.  Notice that the labeling for the facing pattern is on the opposite side of the paper from the pattern from which it's cut.  

Another interesting tip was not to stitch to the very end of the dart in the lining.

We used our very spiky "stiletto wheel" (that's a tracing wheel on steroids) to transfer the pattern to another piece of paper underneath.  



We also worked on button placement.  The extension for a buttoned garment should be equal to the radius of the button plus 1/4".  The top button is placed 1/4" plus the radius of the button below the neck edge, and another button is placed on the bust line.  The remaining buttons are spaced evenly between those two and the waistline.  

The buttonhole width is the diameter of the button plus the thickness of the button.  The edge of the buttonhole is placed 1/8" to the right of the center line.  

I actually have all of the pattern pieces made for my dress now.  This weekend I need to cut it out in muslin and baste it together.  I just have to remember to add the correct seam allowances to all those pattern pieces!  I'm going to cheat a little, too, and not make the facing and lining patterns until after I've fitted the muslin.  I hope we're not supposed to have the lining stitched in for our fitting!

The pattern

I did manage to get a pattern made for the bodice.  Figuring out exactly how to design the front and place the buttons took some doing.  The pattern ended up looking like this:

My next task was to turn that side dart into a princess seam and put the bodice together with the skirt to create a full dress pattern.  I got that done, too, but there's no picture because a) I finished at the very end of class (and then some) and had to pack up my stuff in a hurry to get back across campus, b) it's very hard for me to hold my phone up high enough to take a picture of the entire pattern lying flat, even on the floor and c) there were seven pattern pieces at this point, and you really didn't want to see all of those, did you? Maybe you did.  I'll try to get a picture of the finished product. 

All this time I'd been working with the basic sloper, which is a size 8 pattern.  I'm not a size 8 -- unfortunately.  After three pregnancies and four babies, my waist is too big and my bust is too small for a size 8.  At least my hips are the right size. :)  So I really needed to create my own personal sloper.  This entailed an extra couple of the steps that the rest of the class didn't have to do.  

 Following the directions in this book:

I took these measurements:

and drafted my personal sloper.  Note that this book is not so modern: the copyright is 1942.  It notes that you have to adjust your pattern measurements based on the current corset silhouette styles.  Gee, if I wore a corset, maybe I could squeeze into that size 8 sloper.  If the bust were padded.  In any case, Mom had noted my measurements in the chart some 20 years ago, and yes, I've changed shape quite a bit. And note that my measurements are really close to the 1940s size 16.  I could have purchased that antique pattern off the internet and used it! (And what does that tell you about the people today, given that a size 2 in the stores was a size 16 sixty years ago.)   Anyway, after following the directions to draft these two figures using my measurements

I created these slopers

which I then cut out in muslin to try on. 

Amazingly enough, the muslin fit!  I really didn't think that this would be possible, since I was taking all of my measurements myself.  Try to measure your full back bodice length while standing with normal posture.  How about the back shoulder width?  Some of these I just guessed on and went with the size 16 measurements as noted.  The only adjustments I ended up having to make were lowering the back armscye by 1/8" and letting out the back side seam 1/16 - 1/8".  

Now I just need to take this pattern, adjust it for princess seams, make the surplice front for left and right sides, and attach it to the skirt from my old pattern.  Easy peasy, right?

Oh, and then I have to make the facing and lining patterns.  More on that later.  

Iterations

With a design chosen, it's time to start making a pattern.  After working at it for a bit, this is more difficult than I thought it was going to be.  We started by learning how to make a basic sheath pattern by combining the bodice and skirt patterns.  After removing 3/8" from the bodice waistline, closing one of the darts in the skirt, and slashing and spreading the narrower of the two pieces, these pieces can be combined.  Here's the half-size pattern.

Unfortunately, in the full-size pattern, the skirt front and skirt back end up not being the same width, so more pattern adjustments  have to be made.  I'm still working on getting that part fixed.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my homework home!  (I did bring it back from the classroom to my office on Thursday, but due to numerous other meetings Thursday afternoon and complications with needing to take my bike home and rain, I didn't take the pattern pieces home that day.  I never made it back to the office on Friday since I was gone to a conference. So on Saturday I'm blogging about my problems instead of actually solving them.)

Meanwhile, trying to lay out the asymmetric bodice did make me think more clearly about the design.  My original design sketch said to make the dress with a back zipper.  However, after looking at the back view of the original pattern, I found that it didn't have a zipper.  And a suggestion from the instructor that I add pockets in the skirt (of course!  I hate skirts and slacks without pockets) made me think about the features that I really like in a dress.  Back zippers are not at the top of my list.  Thus I decided to eliminate the zipper in back and change to button-front closure, which meant I had to do something to open the skirt at the waist.

My first thought was to extend the bodice opening down to about mid-thigh and put a hidden placket in the skirt.  This might be the easiest option. However, to really get the placket in, the skirt needs a seam down the skirt, which means the dart on the other side also needs to be a seam, which leads to princess seams.

Instead of a hidden placket, it occurred to me that I could turn this dress into a coat dress.  The darts in the original design were just at the side bust and waist.  When I tried drawing the pattern for the bodice front, I had trouble figuring out where to position the three buttons and getting the dimensions right for the neckline swoops.  A retired professor who was visiting our class suggested that the buttons needed to fall on a seam line.

Note that I still need to figure out where the princess seam falls at the shoulder in relation to the two inset pieces.  Should it be outside the insets?  Exactly meet the inset? End on the second inset?

Just last week, a friend helped me clean out my closet, and we went through the cedar chest, too.  At the bottom I found my hot pink "birthday suit". (For my birthday one year Mom bought the fabric, Aunt M bought  the pattern, and Granmom sprang for the twenty-five gold buttons.  Mom helped me put it together and it was a definite learning experience.)  Alas, I no longer have a twenty-four inch waist, so I can't button it all the way down any more.  My friend suggested I could wear it open as a coat.  This pattern is a coat dress, and I loved it.  Since I still have the pattern, I thought I'd dig it out and check out where the seams were in relation to the buttons.

This pattern has the princess seams ending in the armscye instead of on the shoulder.  However, the front pieces are more vertical than my design.  So here are sketches with the seam in the armscye.  Last considering: should the design be truly asymmetric, with the underside of the bodice forming a round neckline, or should the two pieces be more symmetric, with a curved vee neckline? I think these were all the iterations that I should have made for the last sketch assignment.

And, if this is a coat dress, it needs to be fully lined.  I read all the pattern piecing instructions for that Ralph Lauren dress -- there were a lot of steps!  But, it was a beautifully finished dress.  Decisions, decisions.  Feels free to weigh in.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be keeping a design notebook for this dress with all of these notes included.  Which reminds me that my physics research notebook is languishing with no recent additions.  However, I did conquer LaTeX (sort of) and get a paper submitted for publication this week.

The dress

This week we got the compiled "peer reviews" from the other members of the class.  So which dress (from the first group) did my compadres in the 20-year-old range like?  Dress #8!  My least favorite.  Huh.  I must be getting old.  I think that second place went to Dress #1 with Dresses #2 & 6 tied for third place.  

But, the dress that we actually make is from the second set of sketches, and the dress that got two stars from my teacher also happened to be my favorite: Dress #3b.  This one is actually vintage inspired from a picture I found on the internet. 

Vintage 1950s Butterick 6866 Unusual Button Tab Shirtwaist Dress SEWING PATTERN Size 16 Bust 34 Medium

Color blocking is in, so my challenge this weekend will be to find a three different fabrics that will go together for the collar, or best yet, three shades of the same fabric.  Next week I'll start making the pattern.

Oh, hey, I can actually order the original size 16 pattern.  Let's see, converting 1950's dress sizes to today's dress sizes, I bet that's a 4.  Almost my size. ;)  But wait, the actual measurements are listed: 

Vintage size 16 Modern Medium Bust 34 Waist 28 Hips 37

Yup, almost my size.  But I'm going to put a slimmer skirt on it.  I may also need to add another embellishment or fabric manipulation to it, so be thinking about that!

Revised Sketches

Here are the new sketches, with multiple iterations of my six favorite themes.  I didn't do this assignment quite right, as I was supposed to do multiple iterations of only my top two or three favorites, but there were things that I really liked about all six of these.  To make up for it, I came up with more than the required twenty.  

Dress 1 a,b,c

Dress 2 a,b,c,d,e

Dress 3 a, b, c, d, e

Dress 4 a, b, c

Dress 5 a, b, c, d, e

Dress 6 a, b, c, d