*Bonus* Midweek Costuming Update
A true test of how obsessed one is with any project is how early in the morning one is willing to get up to work on it. These days, I am getting up at 4 a.m. to get a few hours of work in on sewing before I have to go to work. Insanity? I report, you decide.
Hence, this bonus midweek update, which I promise will be full of chills, thrills, and spills.
1) I have done a “gap analysis” (trust me, that joke would kill at an accountant’s convention) and I have figured out how to address the gap on the train. With lace! Now see, I don’t usually like lace. I like more structural, architectural trims. I find lace to be kind of mushy and floppy. But then, I happen to have a metric butt-ton of lace in my possession.
It's hard to see, but that's all lace, all the time, baby. Feast your eyes on this wheel of lace. This enormous EXUBERANCE of lace. I think that's like a 500 yard spool, for serious.
... And this is what the lace looks like. It's quite wide, like 6" I think?
How comes it that I have a metric butt-ton of lace if I don’t particularly like it, you might well ask? The answer is one that can be appreciated by every costumer and seamstress ever - I totally lucked into it at the thrift store.
This photo needs no caption. The extreme awesomeness speaks for itself.
That was my thrift-store fabric score of a lifetime, I think. I mean, barring a bolt of pristine silk taffeta falling into my lap, I don’t think you can top finding a humongous wheel of black lace for $5. But I’ve never quite figured out how I want to use it. I used some of it in the redonkulous purple dress (on the side panels) and while I rather liked the effect, I wasn’t 100% in love with it.
But since I had a gap problem to solve, it was back to the lace I went. The only problem with using lace on the train is that now I have to integrate it into other parts of the dress as well, and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that. But that’s another problem for another day.
The lace is a bit wide for the application. But a quick 1/2 fold & zig-zag down the middle, and the lace is not only shorter, it's ready to be gathered!
Now most people who’s mothers did not take Thalidomide during pregnancy would just whip out the ol’ gathering foot to gather that lace. Not me. As I’ve mentioned, I’m gathering everything on this incredibly ruffly and poofy dress by hand using DMC cotton perle thread. It allows me greater control over the ruffles. And hey, who doesn’t like to spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours doing double rows of basting stitch? Not to mention the joys of repeatedly sticking yourself in the cuticles with a gathering needle. I mean really!
Anyway, I’ll gather the lace and stick it on the gap and it will look luscious.
This doesn't really show how luscious it's going to look, but whatever. That's all I got.
And I”ll probably use lace on the front of the dress too, above the pleating … I guess “pleats with lace ruffle above” will become one of my new trim schemas. Should be nice. And I’ve got plenty of lace. At least, I do now. By the time this project is done it’ll probably all be gone. Or maybe not. Actually, I could probably make a whole dress just out of that damn lace and still have some left over.
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2) Speaking of insufficiencies in material, my beaded trim finally arrived.
The top shows the backside of the trim, which is kind of a fabric backing.
On one hand, it’s perfect. It’s going to be so easy to sew on! But on the other hand, I only got 11 yards of it, which seemed sufficient at the time, but now, having done a bit of measuring and figuring, I discover that even with my simplified beading pattern, it’s completely insufficient. Goddamn it. And that trim is seriously ‘SPENSIVE. So I can either order more or go back to the drawing board. Argh.
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3) Finally, the “rinsing” conundrum. OK, here’s the deal. As part of my ruching of the front & train, I ended up rinsing all the ruched panels in cold water. I can’t quite recall why I did this originally, probably to wash out the white marking pencil. Anyway, when the fabric came out of the air-dry cycle, I discovered that the texture & appearance of the cobalt taffeta is markedly different (no big surprise there.) If you look at this picture closely, you can see the difference in the way the rinsed blue taffeta looks (above) vs. the unrinsed blue taffeta (below.)
I prefer the rinsed. It looks more natural, less Locutus of Borg.
SO, that results in my most recent angst-fest. I *should* have rinsed the lower cobalt piece before applying it, but at that time I kinda thought, “what the hell, it’ll look OK.” But now it’s really bugging me. So I’m thinking I should go ahead and rinse the whole train. But there’s a couple of problems with that. First, I did not pre-rinse the black broadcloth that forms the base of the train … what happens if it shrinks? (In cold water it probably won’t, but still) … and secondly, I’ve already applied the pleats, and I’m terrified of what will happen if I rinse them. Will the ribbon come out looking like crap? Will the pleats be impossible to tame & repress? WILL THE EARTH SPIN OUT OF ITS ORBIT AND INTO THE SUN IN A FIREY CATACLYSM OF DOOM?
Now see, here’s the great thing about being a mature older woman. In my youth, I would have just thrown the train into the washer, said “screw it” and let Fate take its course. But now I’m much wiser about such things, I realized that I don’t have to be Fate’s bitch. I can do a TEST!
So I dug into my scrap pile ...
... and here is the super-cute little wash-test sample I created!
It’s in the washer right now. I’ll pull it out tonight and see how it looks. Updates to follow.
So, there it all is, my midweek update. Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride! (in keeping with the theme of song lyrics that I seem to have been developing throughout these posts.) I’m quite happy about the lace breakthrough, and despite the bead trim setback (and pending the outcome of the wash test) I still hope to have the skirt assembled this weekend. Watch this space for photos!
Mirrored from M.K. Hobson | Necrophilatelist. Please leave comments there.