Crazy Train
I hate to say this but I’m starting to get pretty sick of sewing. And when one is sick of sewing a Parisian trained skirt, one is clearly sick of life. But I am not so sick of life that I’m going to fail in my project blogging duties, because of all the duties associated with this verdammte skirt, it is the least onerous.
As usual, background posts on my attempts to win the Nebula Award for Best Costume can be found starting here.
This weekend I worked on the train and on trim, but I don’t have much to show for the latter and the former turned out to be very much like what I’ve already done on the front of the dress.
Here’s what the train looks like in its (mostly) finished state:
Oh for God’s sake. More ruching?
What that photo doesn’t show is the width of the train. The train is 120″ wide. That 120″ gets gathered (or pleated) down to be sewn onto a strip of twill tape on the bustle that is yea wide:
See that twill tape band? That's about 24". Onto which 120" of train will be gathered. Truly it is a "Crazy Train"!
The process of creating the train was so arduous and annoying that Ozzy’s lyrics (e.g., ”going off the rails” and “mental wounds still screaming”) proved uniquely appropriate. While overall the ruching on the train was exactly like the ruching I did on the front of the dress, for some reason it gave me a lot more trouble. I feel confident that taking the beachhead at Normandy wasn’t as difficult or enervating as wrestling that amount of fabric through my sewing machine.
Here's an approximation of how much the train needs to be gathered in at the top to fit the twill tape on the bustle. Land sakes alive!
While I was very proud that I managed to keep jacked-up seams to a minimum, a few of them still crept in, and it is a testament to my overall dressmaking ennui that I did not rip them out and do them over, because, goddamn it, NO ONE IS GOING TO LOOK AT THE UNDERSIDE OF MY TRAIN. NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN THE UNDERSIDE OF MY TRAIN. MY CRAZY, CRAZY TRAIN!
You have no idea how much a screwed up, fabric-caught line of stitching like this annoys the crap out of me.
Anyway, the whole deal was just horrifying. And remember all that pleating I did last weekend? It STILL wasn’t enough to fully cover the bottom hem of the train (hence the gap):
Mind the gap!
Well, anyway, now the train is done (except for the gap, which will either require more pleating or a big ruffle or something like that; I’ll probably go with a big ruffle because it’s simpler) and the train is really the last major piece of the skirt.
So now, I’m pondering what to do next. My gut tells me that I should just go ahead and assemble the skirt. Or maybe that’s not my gut talking, maybe that’s my desperate desire to actually be FINISHED with this skirt. But on the other hand, I was waiting to assemble the skirt until after I’d beaded the side panels. But on the third hand, I’ve decided to simplify my beading scheme (are you noticing a trend here, readers?) which means that I should be able to apply the bead trim in situ, after the dress is assembled. It’s probably a bad idea to do it this way, but I still don’t have my bugle-bead trim in hand (apparently it’s being shipped by ox-cart from some tiny village in China where the entire economy is supported by the manufacture of bugle-beaded trim) and waiting for it might shred the very last fragment of my sanity like a delicate batiste hanky in an Insinkerator.
The idea of more sewing fills me with an unspeakable lassitude. And it also makes me eye my poor strained wallet with regret. I’ve already run through ALL the fabric I bought (15 yards of black taffeta and the 5 yards of cobalt taffeta). That amount of fabric was SUPPOSED to cover both pieces of the costume, not just the damn poofy skirt. But no, I had to go crazy with the ruching. I had to go nuts with the trim. And as a result, I predict that the skirt, when assembled, will weigh precisely eight hundred and fifty-nine pounds, with 2/3ds of that weight in the train alone. The train has as much mass as one of Saturn’s moons, and I’m not even talking about one of the tiny moonlets, I’m talking Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys or maybe even Dione. I’m going to be the first woman to lose weight at dinner from the workout of dragging her dress around.
Anyway, enough bitching and moaning. By next weekend I’ll have the skirt assembled and ready to show off in photos, and that will make it all worthwhile. And then it’s on to the polonaise, as I’m in too deep to turn back now …
Mirrored from M.K. Hobson | Necrophilatelist. Please leave comments there.