Ciao Bellissime/ Bellissimi!
Hallo dearest needleworking friends: how are you all this week? I’m a great deal more peaceful and well-slept, after the intense festivities and sacred rites, the epic heat, the uber-socialising and the botega-ing of August… Now I'm enjoying the silence and the quiet work, after having gotten a lot of great feedback about what I’m making.
This special dress is one that I launched straight into the days after the Riti were over: I didn’t document any of its creation, sorry! It was so good to just delve deep into fabrics, threads and feelings again, without reasoning or reflecting on it until I finished.
So the dress is constructed from 3 separate garments: a beautiful shiny thick-striped top, and 2 thin-striped silk shirts. I adore stripy materials, and especially these ones in black and white, have been sitting awaiting inspiration and action for some months.
This pile of goodies felt activated by me seeing a gorgeous, more plain dress on one of the thousands of visitors to Guardia this month; it was a layered I think cotton dress, with three or four tiers of different kinds of stripes. I don’t particularly remember the details of it, but the general feel was of this lovely contrast and funkiness, of the different layers – and the overall fullness of the dress.
Though the basic concept of adding one layer to the other should’ve been very straightforward, there were quite a few details that made it harder to construct – plus the slipperiness of the materials – yikes!! Several times the needle of my machine went askew, and I had to unstitch in a few places.
On the whole it was fiddly, but relatively (for me!) easy. Deconstructing older garments is not always as simple as just unpicking them: most clothing have some kind of method to make them hard to un-sew, and from the latter half of the last century, machinery has dictated some very firm stitching and seaming; some really cannot be undone at all. And that involves quite a bit of ingenuity in figuring out how best to reuse the majority of the material of an old garment, but maintain the most surface area/ details/ closures/ borders of each piece getting cut up.
Making enough of the more transparent (midriff) section was a particular fiddle; I had to add the sleeves of the original blouse to the sides of the dress, to make enough width for a nice flouncy shape. This thin silk is soooooo delicate! It was hard to shape and strengthen, but I worked some nice borders into it, and got the sleeves to make kind of side decoration, before attaching it to the cut top. The top was hard to cut too: I cut everything without measuring, hehe, and the top made a bit of a swerve and a zigzag as I tried to shear it cleanly to make a kind of ‘crop top’ sort of shape…
Though this felt like I wasted some of the material, often working in this intuitive way brings an unexpected and spontaneous aspect to the dress – as in this case – very happy-making!
There were other places, in the midriff especially, where it seemed like I’d made a neat cut following the lines, but when I started pinning, it was just-out. Hmmmf.
I loved getting the bottom layer on, below the midriff: each of the materials are very attractive for me – so tactile and interesting – the kinds of stoffe that I could just sit and muse on all day – but this large stripy skirt part of the dress was my favourite. Maybe just because it made the biggest impression when it was added!
Once that was on, it did require quite a bit of ‘correcting’, as there are various places where it needed to be gathered in, let out, seams sewn up, buttonholes hidden, etc. It took a few hours to get it properly in place, so as I could add the final border at the bottom. Which was also hard work: the original blouse which was the starting point, in the shiny artificial fabric, didn’t have enough material to cut a parallel strip all the way around it. So I needed to construct a parallel strip from various pieces of the lower original shirt. In one part, I made the joining of these border strips too loose, and had to create a new patch to cover where it didn’t join well.
Cutting myriad threads from the machine work, and woopwoop! I can go out on the street to photograph it. So glad it fitted on my mannequin AND on myself: I was worried that I had added no zips or buttons to close the dress, but it seems to be fine for putting over one’s head and easily falling down over the rest of the body.
