Dearest Needlework Monday community and Hive friends,
It’s early Monday morning, and I’m sitting by the roaring stove with a very rare mug of coffee, waiting for the water to get heated, and musing over the week’s successes in sewing.
I’ve had a beautifully active 7 days in needlework: I began a rather complex endeavour last week, which was based on a favourite waistcoat… I have never worn it, as I don’t like waistcoats per se, but I loved the fabric print and the fit of it. So it serves well as the core of a dress or jacket…
Firstly, I wanted to add something to the back of the waistcoat, to make it more robust; the old back of it was a naff buff silky thinness, which didn’t make for the top half of a new dress.
I cut the old back of it out, and thought of how to add the rest of a dress to the waistcoat front….
I had a pile of denim scraps, old jeans and suchlike, and wanted to keep the theme of stripes – I love stripes! I found an old miniskirt, cut it open and added one side of it to the other (vertically), to make the back. I liked how the kink in the skirt made a good shape for the final dress form.
The skirt was from old jeans, which I cut up and sewed together to make the wider form, and then attached to the waistcoat-and-miniskirt bodice. Most of this was fairly straightforward, and the sewing machine behaved relatively well, again.
I had to do quite a section of handsewing (again!) for the rest of the finishing though. I still haven’t figured out how to successfully attach a kind of ‘bias-binding’ border – large scale bias-binding, to finish the edges of a garment – in a way that doesn’t involve having to handsew the length of it at least once. This time was the same. I sewed the length of the skirt bottom, on the inside, having used the machine for the first length-attaching.
The fabric on the whole was nice to sew with, especially the denims – these jeans all have some stretch in them, which makes for very nice machine and hand sewing.
The final effect of the dress is rather fun and funky – just how I had hoped. Althouuuuuuuggghhh, the sleeveless kind-of-sleeves are not quite as right as I wanted them. And the overall fit is a bit clunky… But I always feel this way about the clothing I make, until I get used to its quirk!
I might alter the dress some more before I put it on show. I want it to be that little bit more smart, neat, clean-looking.
But perhaps, instead, I might begin doing a second version of a garment, if I don’t find it perfected enough. This way I could improve on my skills, knowing more beforehand about where each piece of fabric is going, or how well an edging will sit.
I finished the dress off by changing its fit, through the careful positioning of a large (visible) button and some (hidden) poppers/ snaps/ automatici - I love how a rightly-positioned button can change a whole garment!
I’d considered closing the bottom part of the dress and having the top part with the above-mentioned closures, but the final dress wanted to be more open and free, as it were. I can envisage this vestita being paraded with cute wee sandals or pumps (tennis kind of shoes) on a lake pier, on a cooling summer evening… The woman maybe sitting to take off her shoes and dip her feet into the lake and watch the sunset.
