Category: Slow Fashion

Renaissance’s Celestial Purple Prom Dress (McCall’s 7091)

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Alright, as promised, a debriefing on Renaissance’s prom dress:

Pattern

McCall’s #7091, discontinued but available online as a PDF file.

Caution: It’s a batch of three downloads with up to sixty pages in each download that you have to tape together. An A0 printing option is NOT available. It took me four hours to tape the one hundred and twenty-seven pages together.

Materials

Dupioni Silk in colorway “Comet Tail” (5 yards), Shantung Silk in colorway “Nolana” (4 yards), and Batiste Silk/Cotton in colorway “Apparition” (2 yards). All three were purchased from Silk Baron.

Working with silk is a lovely experience. I opted to do all of my cutting of the fabrics with a pinked rotary blade in order to cut down on fraying, and that was an excellent choice.

I will not use the Batiste Silk/Cotton as a lining in the future because it has too loose of a weave and stretched and grew like crazy inside the dress, causing the neckline to sag more and more as Renaissance wore it. It’s a beautiful fabric and I want to make more things from it in the future, but it’s not well-suited to give structure to a garment.

Notions

  • Thread: Aurifil 50 weight #2780 when piecing “Comet Tail,” Superior Threads’ Pima 50 weight #8035 when piecing “Nolana,” and I used Coats & Clark Dual Duty XP All Purpose #3510 for piecing the “Apparition” gray lining. Ren used an invisible monofilament thread (that she hasn’t put back so I can’t tell you for certain who makes it) for securing the rhinestone appliques.
  • Zipper: I used a light purple invisible zipper from my zipper drawer, still leftover from the ill-advised purchase of the “scrap bag” of invisible zippers that really only included colors that I’ll rarely ever use. I used blue Sharpie on the zipper pull to camouflage it against the Comet Tail silk.
  • Rhinestones: We bought two rhinestone appliques “Devine Pair Applique LA-11” from Planet Rhinestone on Etsy, and a loose pack of various sizes of rhinestones from Amazon.

I originally planned to use silk thread for sewing this all up, but read online that it was a bad idea and that silk thread should really only be used for embroidery and the like. So I went with cotton.

Renaissance spent all of her free time in the week leading up Church Prom attaching the appliques, and Emily, Ren, and I spent a frenzied two hours on the day of Church Prom gluing the loose gems to the dress with Beacon Gem-Tac adhesive and toothpicks.

Time Spent

  • Assembling the pattern: 4 hours
  • Sewing the dress: My memory is fuzzy on this, but I feel like it was five weeks’ worth of sewing a few hours a day. My estimate is forty hours of work? All those princess seams took a long time to assemble, and I handstitched the contrast skirt’s hem.
  • Rhinestone application: Renaissance estimates that it took at least ten hours to sew the two appliques onto the dress. It was her first time doing something like that. And then three of us worked for two hours together to glue the loose rhinestones on, so 3 x 2 = 6 hours.
  • Total: ~60 hours of work

Highlights

  • First time working with silk and it was awesome! I ended up phoning Silk Baron to get advice on whether or not to wash the fabric before sewing and whoever answered the phone was incredibly friendly and took their time in explaining the situations where it would be ok and why this was not one of those situations because the dye and the shot weave would lose their coolness factors.
  • There is only one pucker in all of those princess seams! I really learned how to ease fabric with this dress. I’m a fabric-easing machine now. The trick is to cut the notches before you pin.
  • The lighter purple contrast skirt was assembled using French seams, which was the first time I’d done them and they turned out great.
  • Watching Renaissance work on sewing the rhinestone appliques to her dress while watching “The Simpsons.”
  • Working with Emily & Renaissance to glue the gemstones onto the dress. I always like family group projects.

Lowlights

  • Taping the pattern together. Seriously, McCall’s, you need to offer an A0 printing option. A lot of sewing happens on a deadline and having to spend four hours upfront taping paper together is brutal.
  • Owing to my background as a quilter, I default to a shorter stitch length when I’m nervous about a seam. It turns out that this is not the correct default when sewing clothing. My choice to go with a shorter stitch length on the two skirt hemlines resulted in bunchy edge finishes, which no one really noticed except myself. The swoopy hem could have laid down so much nicer if I’d realized that. I did redo the hem on the lowest part of the swoop because it had to be trimmed, but didn’t have time to do the upper portion.
  • I also wonder if I should have used a thin horsehair braid on the swoopy hem in order to make it stand out more? When the silk was fresh the swoop skirt stood out in beautiful rounded columns, but by the time it was finished it had gotten limp and didn’t do that anymore.
  • The lining grew a lot and the neckline sagged more and more as she wore it.

Lowlights aside, I am monstrously pleased with this dress! It had twenty-nine separate pieces to assemble because it was a twelve panel princess seam dress, and I made it work! It was beautiful plain and it was beautiful with the rhinestone embellishments. It makes a beautiful swishing noise when she’s moving in it. It’s just a beautiful dress and she loved it and I’d totally do it all over again.

Note: She is wearing a crinoline with the dress to help the skirt stand out more. I think it was this one. Or it could have been this one. I bought both and each girl wore one of them and I can’t remember who had which one.

Links to all posts about Renaissance’s Prom Dress

Prom Dress Crunch Time 2.0

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I am so sorry that I have not been updating for the past two weeks, but I had to get going on Rachel’s prom dress for the church spring formal, which is taking place this weekend. It has been NON-STOP SEWING around here, often taking 8-10 hours a day of focused construction on this beast of a dress! I have had no time for anything else—the girls have been making dinners and I am running low on clean clothes, my friends! But it’s coming together, it is GORGEOUS and we are getting close to being done. I’ll be back next week with spring formal pictures and, hopefully, detailed posts about both the Celestial Purple Prom Dress (which friends named the “Swoopy Mermaid Dress”) AND the Vintage Purple Prom Dress (which I have named the “Lilac Behemoth” because the skirt on this thing, guys…wow.

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I am currently in the midst of flipping the horsehair braid under the skirt and sewing it down, and then all I have left to worry about is the side zipper. I was hoping I could add some embellishments to the bodice, but I think I’m going to run out of time on that aspiration. There’s going to be A LOT of sewing happening in the next twenty-four hours! I was so jazzed when Rachel picked out Vogue 2001 because, FINALLY, a vintage dress pattern! What I failed to recognize was the sheer mass of skirt this thing has and how much time would be needed to just cut the skirts out. Well, that, and the fact that I threw a sheer overskirt into the mix as well…there’s twenty-two yards of fabric in those skirts combined. The skirt circumference on this thing is 528 inches. Big skirt. Super big skirt. Insanity of the highest degree. And then multiply that by two. Go big or go home. See you in a few days with spring formal pics!

FINISHED: Building Block Socks

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They’re so finished that he’s even worn them to church already.

Details:

Pattern: #216 Beginner’s Lightweight Socks, by Diane Soucy of Knitting Pure & Simple (my favorite sock pattern!)

Yarn: Knit Picks Felici Fingering Weight in “Building Blocks” colorway (colorway discontinued), 2 skeins with very little leftover.

Needles: US 0 (2.0 mm)

Modifications: I used the wrong needle size somehow. It should have been a US 2 (2.75 mm).

These were supposed to be done in time for Christmas, so I had to enact the “public shaming” method of pressure to get myself to work through to the end despite missing my original deadline. I will say that this method definitely works for me.

I did use the wrong needle size somehow. The last pair of socks that I made for him, I didn’t write down what size needles I used, and just looked at the picture of them to guess what needles they were and then hunted down a similar-looking set and got knitting. I think I may have a set of gold-colored US 2s and a set of gold-colored US 0s, and…there you go, mistake made. As a result, these are a dense fabric and a little on the snug side, but he says they work well in his church shoes, which are a snug fit, as most church shoes are.

He likes that they’re bold and peppy. I wasn’t expecting that. He’s more of a “dark, monochrome colors” for his socks kind of guy. I was trying to use up stash and I’d had this yarn since 2013.

Progress: Building Block Socks, and Notes on How Long it Takes to Knit a Pair of Socks

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Getting close to the end of these, which is good because I may or may not have fallen prey to a yarn store-closing sale that is now shipping seven new skeins of sock yarn to me as we speak…sorry/notsorry.

As I’ve been knitting on these, my brain keeps trying to make me feel bad about how far behind I am on these, and it occurred to me that I might have a faulty sense of how long it actually takes to knit a pair of socks, thereby dooming myself to always feeling like a failure whenever I knit a pair of socks. As it stands, it feels very comfortable to knit a stripe’s worth of yarn each day on these, and so I counted up the stripes in the completed sock, and it’s 23 stripes. That’s a little over three weeks’ worth of knitting at a comfortable pace. Multiply that by two (because two socks in a pair) and you get 46 days, which equals 6.5 weeks to make a pair of socks for Michael.

In my head…I thought it took four weeks. So of course I always feel like I’m behind when I’m knitting socks for him. It’s good to figure out the numbers on stuff, because numbers generally don’t lie, and I like knowing exactly how things are going to go and numbers are the way to figure that stuff out. It takes seven weeks to knit up a pair of socks for Michael. No wonder I can never finish the “started in December” pairs I always try to make for Christmas. This timetable has been noted in my Christmas preparation notes.

Second Monday in January

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Good morning, lovelies! Hopefully the new year is still treating you well and you’re making progress on the things that matter most to your heart. This week I’ll be (hopefully) finishing the Cat Lady quilt. The quilting is finished, and it’s trimmed; I just need to get going on the binding and label. I’m thinking I’m going to use the loads of C+S Bluebird scraps I have on-hand from when Denise made a dress for Em out of that fabric, which means I’ll be doing a scrappy binding construction because the scraps are very weird shapes–there’s very little yardage that will work for WOF cutting. BUT…it’s C+S fabric, and I have loads of it that I’ve been trying to sew through for years, so this will make a significant dent.

I had hoped to finish the Cat Lady quilt last week, but geez, what a week! Washington got a lot of snow and ice and rain and it just threw everything off kilter all week long. My kids had a two-hour late start for school four days out of five, the roads were flooding over…you don’t realize how stressed you’re feeling about stuff until you get past it and realize that you’ve been holding your shoulders up to your ears for days. And now we have to deal with rescheduling all the stuff that got cancelled, and adding it on top of all the regularly-scheduled stuff…I just wish that people would let things go when they get cancelled? Like, it’s too bad it didn’t happen, but let’s try again next year, rather than trying to fit it into the next couple of weeks that are already booked? Please? But alas…that’s a rare outcome.

Once the Cat Lady quilt is complete, I’m hoping to start work on Rachel’s birthday gift, and I can’t show you anything about it or she’ll figure out what it is. Which also means I have to clean it up everyday and not leave it lying around on the cutting table or the ironing board. Let’s see if I can actually remember to do that everyday…who else thinks that I’ll forget and Rachel will know what her gift is before it’s even finished? It also just occurred to me that I can’t work on this over the weekend days because she’s somewhat of a constant fixture in my craft room on the days that she’s home. So I guess it will take twice as long to stitch this up because I really will only have two days a week that I can work on this. Awesome.

I’m still working on the Nereid Fingerless Mitts for my bestie, and hopefully will have good news to report on them soon. This “tell people you were making them a gift if you didn’t finish it before Christmas” idea has been the perfect motivation to keep me working on those gifts. It might add extra incentive to get things done before Christmas in future years, too: I’m going to lose that special moment of surprise if it’s not done before Christmas because I’ll have to announce it on the blog. I don’t like doing that. But I do like finishing stuff, and so here we are.

Scrappy Thursday this week is for working on the Clementine Quilt. I don’t know if anyone remembers that I was one of the quilters in the original Clementine Quilters group, but I had to quit because we were moving. I hated quitting, but it was definitely the right call at the time because here we are, four years later, and it’s only now that I have the feasible time to work on it again. Fat Quarter Shop supplied me with the fabric to make the quilt, and I don’t feel right accepting fabric from people and then not using it, so it’s been on my mind ever since that I definitely need to get this completed so I can fulfill the obligation that I signed up for originally.

Update on Marshmallow: He’s doing better than he was. It looked like his hind legs were permanently paralyzed for many days, but in the last three or so days he’s started using them again, somewhat regularly. We changed up his meds the day before that development, so it looks like we’ve hit on a combo that works well for him. Pretty sure he’s gone blind though–he seems to only be responding to sounds, and he runs face first into things a lot. He got pushed down the stairs by Charlotte the other day because he walked near her, which is not a thing he used to do because she’ll bat any cat in the face that gets that close to her. (She’s such a GRUMP.) I feel like I need to set something up that will keep her away from him while I’m gone from the house because I’m afraid I’m going to come home to a murder scene or the like. Sigh.

So yeah, bad weather and geriatric cats…last week was intense. Hopefully things are a lot calmer this week!

Rainbow Ombre Mitts knit by Cara Brooke of That Crafty Cara

Rainbow Ombre Heart Mitts

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I made these for Rachel for Christmas. They were the first gift she opened on Christmas morning and she wore them immediately and left them on until she received a gift from Renaissance that had velcro on it, at which point she took off her new mitts so the velcro wouldn’t catch on the yarn. She was incredibly pleased with the mitts.

I bought the yarn for these almost three years ago at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival. (Hmm, I’ll need to go look at scheduling time to go to it again this year–although it’s now operating under a different name: Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat.) Rachel and I went to the festival together and she was entranced by the smorgasbord of yarny goodness at the market, so of course, I had to buy some rainbow yarns that she fell in love with. One of the rainbow yarn purchases was this mini skein set from Canon Hand Dyes, and there’s enough leftover to one day make the matching hat.

Details:

Pattern: My Rainbow Heart, by Stephanie Lotven

Size: Medium

Yarn: Canon Hand Dyes Charles Merino Fingering, Bright Fierce Color (link only takes you to their mini skeins page)

Needles: US 1 & US 3 (2.25 mm & 3.25mm)

Modifications: None

Not gonna lie, kind of wished I’d kept these bad boys for myself. They’re such happy mitts!

Click here to see this project’s Ravelry page.

Embroidering my Historical Pocket

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While my foot continues to heal, I’m limited in my crafting abilities to hand projects because it’s difficult to operate a sewing machine pedal in a boot. No worries, my desire to start assembling historical ensembles means that a lot of things I want to make are perfectly suited for hand sewing due to the fact that sewing machines either weren’t invented or not widely used in domestic spheres for the periods I’m interpreting.

I’ve decided to start working on a pair of pockets for my 1850s ensemble. Have you ever heard the nursery rhyme about Lucy Locket losing her pocket?

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Not a penny was there in it,
Only ribbon ’round it.

I was always puzzled by it as a child, but it turns out that pockets used to be detachable items of clothing, tied around your waist under your skirts. And yes, sometimes those ties could come undone and your pocket could get lost.

Historical pocket embroidery transfer by Cara Brooke of That Crafty Cara. Pattern is from Godey's Lady's Book, October 1853.

There are many historical examples of pockets in museums, and a lot of them have beautiful embroidery. I love a chance to practice my embroidery skills, so I’m going to embroider my pockets as well.

I’ve chosen an embroidery pattern that was published in the October 1853 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book because my 1850s ensemble that I’m making is for a character that lived in Washington Territory in 1855 and would be a little behind on fashions due to slowness of mail delivery. (Let’s be honest here, though–a middle-aged mother of four in any era of history would probably not worry about pocket embroidery at all because yeesh, feeding and clothing your family was hard back then and I wouldn’t be using my time to make my invisible articles of clothing more pretty. Or, maybe it’d be a nice little thing I’d do for myself, finding snippets of time to embroider by candlelight? I like to think about that while I’m working on this.)

I’ve been slowly working on the embroidery, and this pocket has turned into a pocket embroidery “sampler” as I figure out my embroidery likes and dislikes. It’s a good piece to practice and experiment on, and I’m hopeful that my embroidery skills will be much improved by the end of this project. I started with Pinterest tutorials, but hated how they were looking, so I dug out a book on needlepainting by Trish Burr and started working according to her instructions. I like the needlepainting portions much more than the random Pinterest embroidery technique sections.

It seems that most people wore two pockets, so I’ll eventually have to make another. Extant examples of pocket pairs tend to match, but I don’t think I have enough interest in me to do this pattern again–I’m still trying to pump myself up to mirror the image on this particular pocket and stitch it again. Another two times after that?!?! It’s a no from me. Maybe I’ll do the other pocket in that grape vine pattern sharing the page? Or maybe I’ll get lost in researching more embroidery patterns from the era and choose from those! (Probably that last one…because I really enjoy reading through historical ladies’ magazines.)

The embroidery process thus far:

More embroidery awaits! This might be set aside for a little while, though; one of my kids wants a very specific look for their Halloween costume this year, and I’m going to have to sew some of it up myself.

More info on historical pockets:

How to Plan a Birthday Dress

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I mentioned in my last post that I’m going to sew myself a dress for my birthday. I mentioned it for various reasons, most of them being that if I say out loud, I’ll feel like I need to actually do it, and by saying it’s for my birthday, it also gives me a deadline and I just can’t seem to function without a deadline breathing down my neck.

Do you get project paralysis when you’ve got a blank canvas in front of you? Too many choices, so you can’t actually narrow down what the heck you’re going to do? This is totally me, and I find that it works best to take any limitations into account, because limitations help hone your choices by booting out the choices that simply won’t work.

So, we have a time limitation with the birthday deadline: Saturday, May 8th (Not my birthday, but I want the dress done for the Sunday before my birthday) which gives me roughly four weeks. In all honesty, my creative brain totally thinks I’m going to be done with this in a week. My logic brain is worried I don’t actually have enough time to finish this because hi, it’s spring (gardening), school sports are starting up again for some of my kids, I have another secret project that’s going to be taking up a lot of my times, and OH YEAH I HAVE FOUR KIDS. (The four kids yelling thing is something my BFF keeps stage-yelling at me every time I get down on myself for not being “more productive.” I’m supposed to now always yell it whenever I’m thinking of things that I need to take into consideration when thinking about starting new projects, according to her.)

The fabric: Kokka Natural Garden Voile, purchased from Miss Matatabi during a sale in December. I have a rule that if I gasp out loud because a fabric or yarn is so beautiful, that I really need to figure out how to buy some. I gasped at this, saw it was on sale, and bought the rest of it. Not sorry at all. STALKS OF LAVENDER, people! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

Another limitation is the amount of fabric I have for this dress: 4 3/8 yards (8 meters). I know that seems like a lot of fabric, but it’s not because a) I am a full skirt addict, and b) I’m a plus-size gal with a lot going on up top. Of course, I want to do a beautiful circle or pleated skirt that swooshes around, but I just don’t have the yardage for it. I think I’m going to have to go with an A-Line skirt, which isn’t my favorite…but I can’t fight the reality of yardage amounts. It was end-of-bolt, so I got what I could get, and there’s nothing else I can do about it.

Two other limitations: Modesty (Has to have sleeves and hit below the knee), and I don’t really want to spend any more money on extras for this. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to line this because it is voile, but I’m hoping I already have something on-hand for that. I might buy 1/2-1 yard of a coordinating fabric, if my heart gets set on a contrast extra, like a Peter Pan collar, or cuffs, or a midriff section or something like that.

I haven’t made myself a dress in quite some time, and my measurements have changed a lot since then, so it might be a good idea to keep things simple–basic bodice, short sleeves, a-line skirt. There’ll need to be something extra, but I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be just yet. I’d like this dress to be prettily functional; nice enough for church, and not too nice for wearing to the grocery story on days where I want to be cute as I go about my errands.

OK…that’s not too tough. I’ve done it before! (Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me close to year to get it done like I did with the last one, k?)

Goals for this week:

  • Choose pattern
  • Make muslin
  • Adjust pattern
  • Buy lining, if needed
  • Cut fashion fabric and lining

It’s a big list, I know. Any progress will be good progress.

What spring projects are you thinking about right now?

Renaissance’s Easter Dress

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I finished it a while back, but she wore it for our Easter church service at home, and I finally remembered to snap a couple of pictures of her.

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I’ve had this pattern earmarked for a couple of years for her.  I’d purchased some great dresses from Lands End about four years ago for Emily, and then they were handed down to Ren, and now to Rachel, and they are such a great silhouette that I started keeping an eye out for a comparable pattern somewhere out there in Sewing Land.  It appeared one day in the form of Butterick 6450–a bloused bodice with an elastic waist, short sleeves, and a swingy skirt.  It works really great for a growing girl.

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This is View C, sewn up in a cotton lawn from Miss Matatabi.  I underlined the bodice with white cotton voile for modesty, and attached the same fabric as a lining beneath the skirt.  (Note to self: Don’t mix and match underlining the bodice with a lining for the skirt in this pattern in the future–it got messy when it came to attaching the zipper versus the encased elastic waistband.  Pick one method of under/lining and go with it for both the bodice and the skirt.)  I did not do the gathering on the sleeves, and I was surprised that I ended up using the full length of the View C skirt.

The skirt is seamed down the center front and back on the bias, which is something that I’d like to avoid in the future because I want to sew up a couple iterations of this in gingham prints, but that bias seam will cause all sorts of headaches with a gingham. I know it will be easy enough to throw a different skirt onto the bodice in the future, but sigh…more thinking ahead.  It worked well enough with this abstract print, and the skirt has turned out really well and fluttery without the danger of flipping up in a wind gust, à la a circle skirt.

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Construction was easy, with no weird head-scratching moments.  I like bias binding on my edges, so I really love that bound neckline–makes me so pleased everytime I see it!  The instructions on how to hem the skirt were really good and gave a nice finish.  The zipper instructions were a mess and I ended up just hacking the stupid thing in there, but that’s just because I am missing the gene that lets me understand how to put a zipper into anything.  Good enough.

I’m planning to sew up this pattern, with a few design changes, at least two more times this year.  It’s a great dress!

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Tuesday, Week #1 of Covid-19 School Closure

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Last week, the State of Washington announced that it would be shutting down the schools in Snohomish, King, and Pierce Counties for six weeks.  Guess where we live?  😉

Our school district has been absolutely awesome though–all students in grades 2-12 have a Chromebook to use at home, AND the district will be delivering breakfasts and lunches for free via the school bus routes.  How amazing is all that?!?!  I’m so, so happy for everyone who depends on school breakfasts and lunches for their kids.  One less thing to worry about during a time where there’s lots about which to worry.

Online learning begins in earnest tomorrow morning, so we’ll start getting an idea of what to expect in our daily lives pretty quick.  With my kids being on the older side, I’m really hoping that it will be painless.  It’d be great if I could just weather this whole thing out with just a lot of sewing, but schoolwork help is the top priority if I truly do have to make a decision about how to spend my time.  (Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that…)

I might also receive a package from Blank Quilting/Jaftex tomorrow–they sent out an email today saying that, because they’re releasing so many new collections in the month of April, they’re sending fabric to everyone, even if it’s not your month to receive fabric.  I’m scheduled for odd months, and I actually just sent off my March quilt to the quilter, so this is an appreciated surprise for me.  It looks like April is *the* month for their Halloween collections, so the odds are in favor of Halloween fabric.

But I might not receive a package?  I cut off the tip of my finger a couple of weeks ago, and had to send an email saying that I might fall behind on my March quilt, so there’s also a chance that they don’t send me anything because of that?  I don’t know.  There are many questions in my life at the moment and I’m doing my best to just roll with the punches.  (Finger is almost all healed up, thank you for your concern.)

I’m hoping to get a lot of spring clothing sewing done in the next few weeks as well.  I just finished up a dress for Ren, but still need to photograph it.  She was supposed to wear it when she sang with the youth choir for stake conference, but that was cancelled.  So I said she should wear it when she played a flute solo in church this coming Sunday, but then all church was cancelled.  So she wore it last Sunday for our first “church at home.”  I’d like to sew up two more dresses for her, plus a dress or two or three for me, a skirt for Emily, some Easter ties for my guys, and a hoodie or t-shirt for Rachel.  Truthfully, I’ll be lucky to get more than one of those things done, but I like big to-do-lists, so there you go.

Perhaps I’ll try to blog a little more during all this craziness–I find that I’m checking in online a whole lot more than usual these days, and it’s nice when a new post or the like pops up.  I assume it’s the same for you, dear readers, and that you especially appreciate posts that aren’t politically-divisive, religiously overbearing, or some obviously-not-true “cure” for Coronavirus.  (Spoiler alert: Gargling saltwater will not kill the virus…)

I wish you all a good evening, and hope that you’re finding uplifting ways to fill your days.  I also wish you good health, peace, and full bobbins.  Good night!