1912 Tea Dress - Robin

Here's a shot of Lisa's 1912 Tea Dress after we got most of it together on our Sewing Bee.  Now on to what I did!

I mad a vest for my boyfriend for the PEERS Titanic Ball.  Here are a few shots. Sadly for me, but not for him, he lost weight between fittings and the vest is now a little too big for him.   Why does that never happen to me???

Back view of the vest.  The front material of polyester brocade raveled like crazy, even though I finished all the edges before I sewed the pieces together.  That's why I decided to topstitch the whole thing, for added strength.  That also meant that when I found out it was too large for him, it was an "Oh, well....." moment.  I'm not taking the topstitching out.

I made an evening head dress out of some leftover sash material (that pesky Silkessence that Lisa and I love to hate) and added some beading, recalling the Oriental influence at the time.  Here it is posed on my Gibson Girl wig, not quite the perfect time period, but close enough for my purposes.

Here's the dress, completed.  I went through several iterations of trim before I settled for "simpler is better". To me, it STILL looks like a bad Mother of the Bride dress.  I liked Lisa's take on the dress much better than mine.

I had my boyfriend try to level the hem, but he had a difficult time, as I am in a cast and had to stand on one leg for him to pin. It took him forever and it was still uneven because I kept hiking my hip to support my weight on one leg.  I'll fix that as soon as I can stand on two legs again!

I added some cheap ribbon and even cheaper flowers that I cut off of fake ones from Michaels.  Lisa bought a bunch of different flowers when they were having a 50% off sale. Yay!

We'll get better pics of both our day outfits at the Titanic luncheon, hats included.
This week is taxes and the hat, neither of which is guaranteed to be finished on time.

All in all, I hated working on this dress.  I found the bodice difficult to fit properly if one has anything over a B cup.  Of course, after finishing, I came across a tutorial on how to fit an "all-in-one bodice".  Too late for me now, but at least I'll know what to do next time....if there ever IS a next time for this pattern.

Sewing day - Crippling progress - L

Sorry for the bad pun....Robin broke her foot.  Badly.  Like, need a cast and isn't weight bearing...
No dancing for her.
Instead, we worked on our titanic dresses.  This was my last chance to get help with fitting since I'm leaving on vacation on Friday and won't be back until THE DAY I'm wearing the dress for the first time.  Ouch.

Robin needed help to make her layers level. This was made all the more difficult by the fact that I had to stand on one leg and "be level!". Not easy.  And we brainstormed about ideas to jazz up her dress which is just not working for her.  (It's a horrid Mother-of-the-Bride Dress gone dreadfully wrong. )It's possible that her fit problem is related to the slant of her shoulders.  She can't change that, and kimono sleeves have no shoulder seams to adjust.

Robin decided to make my hat so I would have it with me.  She really has a talent for this.  Left on my own, I would have ended up with a gull feather Stonehenge surrounded by origami cranes.  Instead, I have a lovely garden tilted at a rakish angle.
Lisa doesn't understand that a gull feather Stonehenge surrounded by origami cranes would be awesome (in a different environment or for a different purpose than we have here). [really?  I can't imagine where, except in my brain where it does, in fact, seem awesome] My talent is taking a crappy looking decorative hat, shaping it so a human could wear it, and decorating the heck out of it so that not much of the ugliness is left to show. I do like my "rakish angle", though. Somewhat inspired, given the exactly round hat shape I started with and the fact that Lisa DOES have a difficult-to-fit head.  Since we cannot have matching hats, mine will just have to be MORE AWESOME than hers! If I get around to it.....

And we did the final fit on my dress, whereupon I sewed up the remaining machine seams, added a period incorrect zipper and pinned the sash.  Now I have to sew the final hem, tack down the lining inside the bodice, tack the sash in place and decorate.  And by that, I mean any additional tucks and tassels along with the sash ends that hang down the back.  And a little something to hide the zipper since the zip totally shows.

I love the way Lisa has mixed her fabrics.  I love her colors and I love the way she's taken off with this simple pattern and made it her own. When we started, we were worried that we'd be too "twinsy", but there's no way that's gonna happen now.

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!

February Sunday Sewing Bee or Finessing the Fitting - L&R

Lisa and I have scheduled a sewing day once a month for this year.  So far, we are sticking to it because we have so many projects going and so much fitting to do. Normally, we have two machines going, but I'm taking Lisa's in to the shop (the dealer is closer to me) and my other machine was set up for embroidery, so we made do with one. We turned the dining room into a factory and set to.




 First up, we worked on our Titanic Tea Dress muslins.  The pattern is from Sense and Sensibility and looks easy on the surface, but fitting the bodice is NOT easy. The front and back are all of a piece so adjustments often come with some unexpected side effects elsewhere. For mine, I tried to increase bust and lengthen it, but the way I did it gave me too much material under the kimono sleeve. We ended up using the original muslin with no FBA and adding length to the bottom, the easiest solution for me.

Lisa, in attempting to have enough material for her full bust, cut a size too large for her shoulders, but had a great fit for the FBA.  Instead of recutting, we glued fabric on to the muslin to get a shoulder line that wouldn't fall off her VERY small shoulders.  This is the beginning of the Franken-bodice.

My problem was that I had to add a lot of room for bust coverage plus length in the torso.  I ended up adding too much in the bust area so after angling the bust line and not having success, I removed a chunk of length and added it UNDER the bust.  You can see the glue lines and the vast difference this fitting made.  
Now we are ready to cut in to the fashion materiel - but not today.  Today is for fitting.
Actually we had cutting the fabric on our list of 'to do' but we just didn't have time.  We don't need each other's help to cut.  But we do solve problems together much better than alone.  L.

Material and pattern pieces adorned every surface. We had bolts of muslin and scraps, our Titanic fabrics, the Frock Coat Lisa is making for her S.O., a 1940's muslin, a Ren Corset and Lisa's 1912 lace-insertion slip (needed button holes and my machine is the resident button hole master.

Rob plays with fabric.

I made 12 buttonholes, sewed on 12 buttons.  I sewed together enough of the frock coat to be able to fit the shoulders and back-side seams.  I fit my Titanic bodice (about 6 times with cutting and gluing between each fitting) and then cut a final version.  And I did a first 'look' at a renaissance corset (see below). L.

Ugh!  I cut this out according to the measurements listed on the envelope and this muslin is just... big. Lisa keeps reminding me that envelope information is only a suggestion.


I love the intricacies of the draping but the only place to alter is on the sides and in the back.  Lisa gave me deeper back darts and took the sides in about 4 inches total. We wondered why it looked so dumpy and Lisa was considering even fitting alterations when we had an epiphany - We hadn't accounted for shoulder pads!!! Argghhh!

Now, I have pretty "strait across' shoulders, but this design, without shoulder pads, makes me look slope-shouldered. Below you'll see a shot of the pattern envelope and the solution.

Notice how the fit changes on the left (to viewer) side once the
wadded-up T-shirt stands in for a shoulder pad? It gave the shoulders
much needed form.  I'm still not the same shape as the fashion
rendering, but it makes the dress less dumpy on me. Hopefully,
the polka dots of the fashion fabric will fool the eye around the tummy area even more than the draping!

We also fit a muslin for Lisa's Renaissance corset and decided that she needed to cut a size 6 back and try to mate it to the existing size 20 front - those dang narrow shoulders actually are part of a very narrow back!  We redrew the offending back pieces.  Once Lisa gets the muslin pieces somewhere in the correct size territory, she'll cut out a new muslin of canvass or something that won't stretch to test the final fit before using fashion fabric.  In the meantime, I've decided to make "fitting lacings" where you have lacing grommets on a twill tape that can be stitched to whatever corset you are trying to fit.  I think we can both use this and it beats the heck out of trying to guess where it'll end up.
I'm just going to take a second to whine.  I really have the oddest shape.  It is really hard to fit.  Even when I was very thin, I couldn't find clothes that fit.  Now that I'm heavy, it's insane.  My weight is not evenly distributed.  But to end on a positive note, I am forced to learn a lot about modifying patterns.

All in all, a most productive day after which we were, again, both exhausted.

Failure IS an option - Titanic - L

The bodice for the Sense and Sensibility pattern (S&S going forward) is not a difficult build, but it has a lot of drape so I need to get it right.  My first attempt at the modified pattern didn't work.  I got the 'volume' correct for the bust, but I didn't add enough length.  I'm going to add in more and ask Robin to help make sure the fit is accurate.  It's difficult to hold the back in place while trying to make sure the front fits.  It would be helpful to be Doctor Octopus at times.
This is when you are supposed to schedule a ladies room fitting after work, ya silly git!

Meanwhile, a large part of my brain is churning through options for embellishment and how much that will impact the basic bodice design.  And also pondering dealing with using the bird in my freezer as part of a hat (no worries, it was dead when we found it).

And, for the record, it is 100% illegal to catch, kill, or collect songbirds in the US.  Why?  Because we nearly killed off many species specifically to make hats!  I'm on a shared permit to collect dead via a beach volunteer group I'm in.  I really probably shouldn't have kept the bird in the freezer.  For myself.  And yes, crows and ravens are songbirds.  Now I'm off to read up on taxidermy.