Danielle Dress Bodice
Progress on the Danielle Dress is SLOW. It’s not helped along by the fact that we’ve been watching our way through Six Feet Under in the evenings, not at all condusive to actually getting any sewing done.
The fashion fabric is some crinkly chiffon-type thing that slips and slithers and would generally drive me nuts if it wasn’t underlined with and hand-basted to the black cotton. Of course, all that hand-basting takes time… (though I can do it while watching Six Feet Under, which renders it marginally more acceptable to my sweetie.) It’s a print (obviously), which is rare for me, especially for a fabric I actually bought. Originally it was for a skirt for my daughter. I also used it as a single layer in a tiered skirt for me. But after all this I had about 3m left that languished in my stash (one of the few full-sized pieces) until now.
But the bodice is at last assembled and fitted. It fit really well, although the back (oddly) was a touch too big… I re-sewed with the rear side-seams about a cm deeper than they were supposed to be (front seam allowance normal) and that seems to have fixed it up nicely. I thought the darts came too high up (they’re supposed to stop an inch or so short of the bust of the apex, right?) but when I shortened them it didn’t work at all, so the darts are basically exactly as the pattern directed. We’ll see how this goes. I kind of have a horror of darts, mostly to do with my inability to locate them correctly (and symmetrically). The next trick will be getting the pleats in the skirt to line up with the darts.
I may have mentioned I screwed up the front of the skirt, cutting what should have been a centre front fold. I think this might actually be the first time I’ve made that particular mistake… anyway, the plan is to make it into another pleat, with an inset of the same fabric as the waistband (incidentally the same fabric as my black JJ 🙂 ). We’ll see how that looks. At the moment I’m still struggling to get the skirt panels basted to their underlinings, which is almost enough to make me tear my hair out all on its own.
On the plus side, I did make it to Fabricland today to get lining. On the negative side, the awesome 2-for-1 sale of last week was done. Linings were on 30% off—which is fine for the cheap lining I got for the dress, but not going to cut it for the six to eight metres of Kasha lining I need. Also they didn’t have any good colours (not even that light grey there was reams of last week… they must’ve put it away in the back somewhere). I did find hair-canvas in the interfacings, which was cool. I’d like to play with that when I make my blazer. I don’t think I need it for the winter coat, though.
Anyway, that was a pretty long post to say I’ve basically got almost nothing done. Oh, and I picked up Burda 9610 for like 4 bucks. So now I can make my kids jean-jackets if I really want to. Which I kinda do. There was some cool non-stretch, slightly sparkly denim. Maybe I could make that up while they’re away in July :D. Ooo, I like that thought.
Still didn’t pick up a knit. The nice ones are too expensive, the others all suck. /sigh. I need to get a nice knit pattern so I have some more motivation…
UPDATE: and now one of my underlining pieces has disappeared. Not tragic—if it doesn’t show up by the time I’m done basting the back skirt I can always recut it—but another time-waster.
Tanit-Isis Sews 