Monday, April 27, 2009

Dress Day 1

Well, it's not really day one, but I made the first stitch of the yellow maxi dress today!!

I spent the early part of the morning scanning the rest of my pattern pieces and pasting them together. I'm glad I did it, because that way I can make this dress in one of the other styles again if I want to. Or, the more likely option, I screw up one of these and need a new piece!

I made all kinds of flubs today. Nothing too catastrophic, and nothing I couldn't fix. Well, except for this:


Yes, that is a hole in the black fabric in the shape of an iron. I am so used to working with heavy cottons for quilting, and ALL my clothes are wash-and-wear (read: cheap), so I always just crank that iron up all the way when I use it. Apparently when you press a 400 degree iron onto silk polyester, bad things go down. Noted.

Then came the pattern placing and cutting parts. Andrea told me to finish the fabric with a serger or pinking shears, and I definitely do not have a serger (or really even know what one is), so I went to use my mom's Singer pinking shears that would probably stay pristine in a chemical fire, only to find out that they are LEFT HANDED. Bummer. In an act of total altruism, my mom tells me she'll treat me to a new pair of pinking shears. She does this sometimes, and I do not complain. So since the Stitching Post has closed (well not quite yet, they're still having their "sale" but I kind of refuse to go back), we went to this tiny little house-turned-sewing-shop just down the road from Stitching Post. Did they have pinking shears? ONLY LEFT HANDED ONES. Hello? Am I in an Alanis Morissette song? Is it 1994? We ended up at Joann, of course, where they had lots of pinking shears, and of course they were on sale. Hello, small businesses, I am trying to help stimulate the local economy. Could you throw me a bone here? I came home with a pair of Gingham shears that even come in a little tin. I love things that come in little tins.

Hm. Well, I was so excited about my new pinking shears that while cutting out the pieces for my bodice, I just lobbed off where I should have cut out notches. Not on all of them, I did remember to make one. So I traced them onto the wrong side of the fabric along with the markings and we're going to hope that works. I had a heck of a time pinning this waify paper to silk polyester. Times like this make me miss quilting. Mat, fabric, right angle, rotary cutter, done. (Of course, on my first quilt I cut out about 100 triangles one inch TOO SMALL. So I'm used to setbacks). But I did manage to get a good looking two pieces cut:


They aren't perfect, which is driving me a little crazy. My t-shirts are color coordinated. I need perfection in my life. There are ripples in the pattern piece but it took me about an hour to get this all pinned, so it was as good as it's going to get. And hey! You can see my lonely little double notch on the right pattern piece. I will try to be good next time.

I know I should have waited and cut out the rest of the pieces of the bodice, but I couldn't wait. These four pieces were all going to get stitched together anyway, so why not now? And this is what they look like now:


This should be interesting. I have absolutely no plans tomorrow and it's supposed to be cold and rainy, so I might have to sequester myself back to the sewing room (which is actually my brother's bedroom, but he is at Michigan getting a Ph.D. in something really complicated so I'm pretty sure he isn't coming home for a while!) and see if this is really going to come together. I have about double the fabric I need for the bodice, and I'm pretty confident that even I can't screw up sewing three straight panels of fabric together to make the skirt, so I have plenty of wiggle room to ruin it a few times.

Today, Dress 2, Amy 1. Tomorrow is another day!

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