Wedding Gown - Version 1

Hello again, friends.

I was initially considering sharing those pictures once the dress was all finished... but you've been so supportive and understanding about it that I decided to share them with you sooner than later. :)

Here is the first version of my gown - in blue dupioni, with an overskirt opening out to a white taffeta panel.

(the lining wasn't attached to the dress here, hence the raw edges at the top; and the straps were not perfectly finished yet - I was testing their placement)

Technically, I am honestly happy with how it looks.
However, my petite frame (154 cm/barely over 5 feet and 47 kgs/103 lbs) looks somewhat overwhelmed in this majestic dress... I am not perfectly at ease in it. All those layers of stiff fabric at the front are too much for me. As a matter of fact, I like the flowing look of the lining much better.

So, I removed the overskirt and re-stitched the dress (which did mean re-sewing the bodice front by hand, again) to see the effect of a simpler dress; yet I still wasn't sure I was 100% happy with it. (I would be re-making the middle panel in dupioni in that case, though). Even though it has been washed and has lost a bit of its stiffness, the dupioni is still very... majestic. I can't find a better way to put it. We absolutely adore the colour and the uneven texture, though.
If you have any suggestions, by all means, fire away! They will be very welcome.

I wondered whether the underlining was partly responsible for the stiffness, but I really don't think so - it is very thin and lightweight.

Now that I've put it aside for 10 days, I'll try the dress on again tonight, and hopefully Seb will manage to take a few minutes off his frantic thesis work to take pictures!

~*~

I learnt today that the last cat that was still at our parents' died... I had brought her home 14 years ago, when she was just a tiny, fluffy angora kitten. She was such a sweet, easy-going kitty and we all loved her to bits. She'll be missed!

~*~

BUT, I am so happy at Barbara's wonderful news... It makes my heart sing whenever I think of it. I love you, Barbara!

I also received some astounding mail from a very special friend, whom I'll never be able to thank enough... I still need to find a proper way to share this with you.

I am still terribly behind with blogs and emails (actually, this is getting worse and worse). Please bear with me, friends! I am thinking of you, and promise to be back on your blogs as soon as I can.
Sending hugs all around!

Underlining Wonders

Hi everyone.

I mentioned the process of underlining in a previous post. This wasn't part of the pattern's directions for my gown - they merely indicate making a lining (which I did, too, and which you can see here). However, Susan Khalje explains in Bridal Couture the whys and hows of underlining a formal garment.

This is a picture of the underlining process:

You can see here all the bodice pieces and one of the 9 skirt panels. I cut each of the pattern pieces once in the dupioni, and once in lightweight batiste. The two layers then need to be hand-basted in order to prevent any shifting, and are then handled as one layer when you construct the dress.
It took a lot of time to hand-baste all these pieces together, but this has a lot of advantages (and is soothing for the mind!). Here are a few of them, which I particularly appreciated while sewing up the dress:

1. The pure white batiste makes the dupioni look more radiant;
   
2. you don't have to worry about seam allowances showing through when pressing the seams open (and that is a common problem with dupioni),
   
3. More generally, you can press the garment more easily after each sewing step, because the batiste side will take a little more heat
   
4. you only have to add the pattern's markings to the underlining, which means you don't have to worry about markings that may not be erased easily on the fashion fabric, and that may show through.
5. The double layer limits the tension/puckering problems when sewing on the machine. I did use a tiny 60 needle, however. After a few tests on a scrap, that is what gave the best results on the dupioni.

A post is to follow with pictures of the dress...

(ps: Sorry about the post that showed up in Bloglines yesterday, dating back from months ago (about my spring blog layout). I have no idea why - I didn't edit that post at all. Weird!)

The storm after the lull

Hi everyone,

I must apologize for not being very chatty lately - for not visiting your blogs enough, nor replying to your *lovely* emails in a timely fashion. I sincerely apologize. This doesn't mean I've been forgetting you friends - simply, this has been a very, very busy time for us here and I hardly have any time at all to spend reading my emails or your blogs.
Here is what has been going on in our little corner of Paris:

• Seb is due to turn in his PhD thesis by the beginning of July, besides having lots of grading work at uni, and a generally frantic end of the year ;

• I am trying to finish the first third, i.e. first 150 pages of mine (I started my thesis a year later than Seb - oh, and we work in very different fields!). I am feeling very productive right now... Mamie would be proud of me... so I must make the of most the inspiration.

• I finished the outer layer of my gown, but will most probably remake it in an airier fabric. My sisters do think I'm a bit crazy, because they love the dress as it is, BUT they do understand completely. The dress is technically and objectively a success, but it is not 100% me. It is too queenish for little me. So, I want to try and re-make the outer part. Seb agrees, and thinks the dupioni won't be lost anyway, as I can either save the dress for another occasion (for one of my sisters) or re-use the fabric to make other things with it. I'll tell you more about that another time, if you promise not to think (or at least, say!) that I'm totally insane.
  

• Oh, and I still try to be cantor at Mass as much as I can. This is the only way I manage to be at church without crying my heart out. It does require some extra time, but makes me feel more complete and slightly more at peace.

• My big problem is insomnia... 3 weeks after my grandma's passing, sleeping remains a painful challenge.

Thank you very much everyone, for giving your opinion about the shrug/stole dilemma. It was so kind of you to take the time to do so, and your comments were very helfpul. I'm going to go with the shrug for the church, and if I have enough time and fabric left, I'll make a stole for later in the day.

I promise you a *blog love giveaway* very soon...
Hope you're having a wonderful weekend!
Love to you all.

Please help me choose a shrug/stole

Thank you very much for all your positive comments about the dress's lining. I did a lot of work on it since the last post, and objectively it is finished... Except it isn't, at all. ;) More on that some other time. :)

I need to make something to wear over the dress at church and in case it gets chilly later in the day. In my pattern stash, I have 2 patterns for shrug or cropped jackets. But I could also make a stole instead.

It would be wonderful if you could all help me with your preference here, so I created a poll for it.

Here are the jacket/shrug choices:

1. Simplicity 3867:

ETA: The effect would be similar to those:

(I made the top from Simpl. 3867 a couple of weeks ago, and it turned out pretty nice - that is a great pattern ensemble)

Simplicity 4310:

Two options here:
2. view B with the ruffled sleeves, or
3. with straight sleeves as in view A (but I wouldn't be making the collar).
In either case, I would be making the jacket shorter, so as to match the dress's empire waist.

4. A simple stole, as in the dress's original pattern
(New Look 6318)

In any case, I'll be using white taffeta... or pale blue crepe, according to the dress's final version. (Obvisouly, the weight and look of taffeta vs. crepe are very different, so that would also be influenced by the choice of cover-up.)

So, please, friends, vote away - there's also an "Other" option where you can type in another idea/pattern, should you feel so inclined :)

Thank you so much everyone :)

Chiaroscuro

Thank you friends for your words of support.
I don't feel up to talking about what has been happening since my last post... Hope you will understand. But *thank you*, for being there for me at that difficult time. Your words meant a lot and I carry them in my heart.

I saw my thesis supervisor last Saturday and I must have looked pretty dreadful, because even though I didn't mention the sad events in my family, she told me like 10 times to take at least a week off (my last holiday was taken last July) and that I would only work better afterwards - that I wasn't late in my writing anyway.

So, I am not working this week.
After finishing/making a couple of garments (to be mentioned in further entries), I decided I felt strong enough to go back to making my gown. Sébastien and I wanted at first to delay the ceremony, but last Saturday I realized my mum was putting her heart into it, as a way to look forwards to the future, so she was disappointed when I told her we were thinking of putting it off by a few months. (We were planning to have a small party with both families in my parents' country house in Northern France, right after the ceremony in Paris, so my mum had started planning this in her mind).

But this is so strange, friends - 10 days ago, I was asked to organize my Mamie's funeral - to choose and prepare songs and prayers, and to write up a tribute for her. A few days later, I am back to choosing texts for us. Most of them were chosen already, but the psalm remained undecided. Now I know. We shall be singing the same Psalm as for my grandma, Psalm 22/23. It befits either occasion. I'll be singing Gounod's Ave Maria for her too, just like I did when we bit her farewell last Wednesday. (I still don't know how I managed to sing it, but it did come out. The fact that my brother was accompanying me on the cello gave me tremendous strength.)

Back to the gown.
After reading through Susan Khalje's Bridal Couture one more time, I cut out and constructed the lining yesterday.

I chose pure white 100% cotton batiste. It should feel very smooth and fresh against the skin, even on a hot summer day.
The boning has been sewn onto the seam allowances of the side and front side seams.
I basted an invisible zipper to double-check the fit.

Obviously, since this is the lining, it will be worn the other way around once it is attached to the final dress: the finished side will be against my skin, and the wrong side with the seam allowances will be against the outer fabric's wrong side. But I don't have a mirror large enough in the flat to see myself properly, so those pictures are very helpful to check the fit and overall effect. (I did check the fit both inside out and outside in.)

I sewed the bodice by hand, as the point in the middle front was difficult to get to lay perfectly smoothly otherwise. Once I was sure it was looking right, I sewed an extra row of machine stitches above the hand-stitching. The empire waist seam holds the whole weight of the skirt, so it seemed better to do a double row of stitching.

The inner construction will also involve a waist stay, that will be tacked to the boning and help with the weight of the skirt.

The finished dress will also have wide straps.

Sébastien had this nifty idea of pinning a blue cloth against the window to create a background. How sweet of him. He seems to be enjoying this photographing job more and more.
And of course, our P'tite Mignonne (Little Miss Cutie) has to check every step of the sewing process.
So you see, this is really a joint effort from everyone in the household.

Today, I washed, pressed and cut out the blue silk, white taffeta and batiste underlining, and hand-stitched the batiste underlining pieces to the silk pieces. All the careful pressing and hand-stitching took longer than anticipated, but I so want it to be done right. It's OK - gives me time to think and remember.

I am still undecided whether to underline the dupioni overskirt. It will open out onto the taffeta underskirt and I'm not sure which is best - to have a single layer of blue dupioni or to have it underlined with batiste. The pattern instructions say to have one single layer - there is no lining at this point - but then, the pattern never mentions underlining.

~*~

I simply hope it may be possible that somehow my grandma knows what I'm up to, and knows how much heart I'm putting into it. Every stitch of this gown is being made with her in mind.
Right now, I don't know if she knows. I don't really know where she is.
All I know is, she must have been so happy, making her own younger daughter's (my mother's) wedding dress, 31 years ago. And she would have been so happy, seeing me making my own dress.

Thanks again, my friends.

Today was Mother's Day in France.
Mamie, a model in motherhood, left us the evening before.

Every Mother's Day shall now be Mamie's Day for us.
A day when we remember her saintliness,
when we celebrate the immense blessing it was to have her as a (grand-)mother.


Mamie (98), Robin (4 months), Catherine (30),
Less than 3 months ago.

(I'll be away and offline for several days to a week.)

The dress that shan't be worn

After yearning for the Hot Patterns Cosmopolitan dress for months, and finally caving in and buying it, I excitedly set about to make it as soon as I had received the pattern. I ran into several difficulties, some due to the fabric, others due to the pattern (or my use of it - I'm not saying the pattern is wrong, because truly, that design is beautiful and we have seen many stunning versions of it on the Internet. I think I'm wrong); I steadily worked on it last Sunday, and every evening this week.
Well, tonight, I feel like an abominable seamstress, with an impossibly wrong upper body.

I did several adjustments to the pattern, thanks to the heads up given by sewers at patternreview.com: the scoop neckline in particular was cut very low. (Special thanks to Cidell!) I raised the neckline, adjusted the back's width to fit my own back, which seems narrower than the norm. I patiently undid several seams... This, my friends, was a loooong and painstaking process in this fluid velour, where the small stretch stitches were virtually invisible and the thin fabric easily tearable.

Well; I'm sure you can all see what's wrong. The scoop neck is too wide, and the back rides up too high somehow. I made the mistake of applying facings instead of choosing an alternative finishing method. Now, I don't think I'll ever forget that facings are not the way to go with a knit! Lesson learned, I swear.

So, well. Maybe I was just too tired and distracted by sad news this week to make a good job with that dress. Honestly, unless a genius out there comes up with a magical solution, I don't think I'll ever wear that dress. I am frustrated because Seb adores this fabric and of course, I only had those two metres. It is a Roberto Cavalli fabric which I got for 4 euros a metre on a German website.

The only thing I can think of changing is the facings, but what should I do? My only clue right now would be to rip the facings (3 long seams, yikes) and bind the neckline: that would raise the neckline by 1,5cm, since the seam allowance would be up. But what with? Same fabric? Bias tape?
Do you talented sewers have any ideas that could make this dress wearable? I would be so grateful.

I still do love that pattern and I vow to make it again, this time in a woven fabric, and to try and find out what went wrong and how to fix it.
I do like the fit of the lower half of the dress; the waist ties were originally very long and meant to go around the body several times, but I realized the effet was a bit overwhelming on my 154-cm frame, so I cut the ties shorter and simply tied them in the back.

~*~

Why don't you see my face in the pictures today? Well, my grandmother is even worse, and since I got those distressing news I have been bursting into tears at any hour of the day and night. Trust me, friends, you just don't want to see my face right now.

I was about to post a blog giveaway, but now sense it is better to hold it out for a while. Also, please don't be surprised if I'm a little silent on your blogs in the days to come... This is a sad time for us.