It’s been over two months since my last blog. Blogging about dressmaking is a lot harder than I thought! I have realized that once I go into dressmaking mode, I can’t seem to tear myself away to type about it. As with everything I do, I hope to continually improve my skills. Maybe one day I will also be an expert blogger, but for now, I seem to do best blogging in retrospect.
As you can imagine, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Luckily I did take pictures of interesting parts of the process.
So, where was I??
Well, this looks like the oldest photo I could find of the dressmaking process since my last post. I’m not sure exactly what I was going to write about when I took this photo, but I’ll tell you what’s going on.
Since Leah’s fittings have gone very well, and her schedule for fittings is fairly limited, I decided to permanently finish quite a bit of the dress for her First Fabric Fitting. Different fabrics work differently, so you can never go from muslin straight to a completely finished fashion-fabric garment, but I’m getting this one pretty close. I am only going to leave the side seams (and a few other little bits) basted for the fitting. These will be my points of adjustment if we need to refit.
It’s actually a pleasure to be able to do this, since you never want an overworked dress. If you can put a stitch in for real (and not have to baste it and then re-open it and then stitch it permanently) it not only saves time and labor, but it saves the dress that extra stress of going again to the machine and again to the iron. Get it right the first time and it always looks its best. That said, if you put it in permanently and then realize you need to change it, it is even more difficult to fix. So it is a delicate balance.
So exactly what are you looking at in the photo?? Taken from above, I’ve got the dress laid out on the table with the side seams open on the top and bottom of your screen and the finished shoulder seams down the middle of the pic. To the right is the front of the bodice with the criss-cross neckline and to the left is the deep V-back. Basically, the brown paper in the middle is the neck opening and the scissor is in what will be her left arm hole. Make sense at all??
After this photo, I did a little more finishing and then basted the two long side seams together by hand, as well the hem. These seams will be my points of adjustment for the next fitting.
