Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Titanic Tea Dress with Lisa Posting for Robin

Robin has been without computer while I've been without sewing machine.  She sent me a couple of phone pics of her progress and I'm posting them for her.  I have pictures of her bodice but they are both poor quality, and show a bit of skin that she might prefer not to share.  So, with that, here is her basted together tea dress in it's poorly lit iPhone glory!
And here is MY hat!  pinned to the hat form, curled, warped and partly decapitated.  The crown was too tall for my cranium.
Now that I've posted this, she can pile on with her comments of woe about fitting this pattern.  Because she really, really doesn't like it.  She is a stickler for fit.  I am delighted by baggy loose stuff.  This is why I need her.  BTW, that's a $3 wall decoration not a 'real' hat.  Robin is working miracles.

I got to a point on this bodice where I just gave up. I cannot make it stop bunching in strange places.  Yes, I know it is kimono-style sleeves and that there should be some pit-ease but this thing bunches above the bust, at your clavicles, any- and every- where it pleases and no amount of futzing is going to fix it.  This is the Whack-A-Mole of bodices whereby, if you fix one thing, another pops up wrong. This is after two muslins, one if which fit fine until I cut it out of fashion fabric.
You can't see it in the photo, but the layers are all wrong, too.  The bodice is just basted to the bottom layers. This thing looks like a Mother-of-the-Bride dress, and a bad one at that.  I'm just hoping that a lovely, creative sash and a killer hat will keep people from looking at this horrid costume for too long. 

I'm loving making Lisa's hat, though.  At least the straw is cooperating. I made that curl with a lint brush and some steam.  Whoo hoo! I'm using the hat block my boyfriend got me for Christmas, taking a perfectly round hat-head hole and making it something a real person could wear. Maybe I should stick to millinery. 

Creeping Progress on Tea Dress - L

OK...this is a really crappy picture and the full length picture keeps disappearing in cyberspace.  But this is where I'm going.  The bodice is sewn together.  Mostly.  The side seams are sewn together.  Everything else is draped and pinned.  I needed to do this because I'm losing momentum.  I can't get any of the layers to hang evenly so I can't sew anything together.
Well, I suppose I could sew in the net sleeves.
Tonight I will try to baste the underlayer to the bodice and then baste each outer layer over it.  THAT should allow me to get close to even.  And when I say 'un-even' I am NOT talking about a quarter or half inch.  I've got 4 - 6 inches of crazy.
Please wish me luck.

This picture is even worse quality, but I finally got it to move from my phone to my computer.  You can see that the top layer is so very far from even that...well... it's really bad.


I mad a TON of progress last night.  I got the top and bottom hand basted together and everything is hanging nicely.  I got the lace 'over' sleeve sewn to the front.  The net 'under' sleeve is sewn in.  Tonight I plan to baste the chiffon and lace over layers into place and baste the center seam line on the top.  There are so many layers and they are each a different size!  I'm basically sewing them into place by hand so I can machine sew them all together.  I even got a hem pinned!  
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!  And it's TEA!