Sunday, May 30, 2010

Of Stays, the 1920’s, and Pattern Drafting…

Hello All,

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend so far. Aaron has been taking his Western Regional Boards this weekend. It’s one of the last hoops he has to jump through to be a dentist. He’ll find out in 4-6 weeks if he passed and if he can then get a license. It’s pretty exciting.

All’s well and sporadic on the sewing front. I finally have my stays completed to a point where I can wear them. I plan to try them out for at least one event before I finish them. I want to make sure there aren’t any adjustments needed before I bind them and put the lining in. I also still haven’t decided if I am going to add straps or leave them strapless. So, I’m going to try them both ways. I’ll let you know what I decide. As they are now, they are very comfortable and I love the shape they give me. We’ll see how they feel after hours of wearing them. Anyway, here is what is done thus far.

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Oh, and as you can see, I decided to go white with a blue binding.

Ok, on to the ‘20’s. We are having a Diesel Punk party on the 4th of July for Aaron’s graduation. Now, Diesel Punk spans from WWI to WWII. So, I decided I needed to make a 1920’s dress. I also fell in love with the 1921 Vionnet dress in Patterns of Fashion II. I’ve seen a reproduction of the gown, by Katherine, and it is just gorgeous. Anyway, I started enlarging and drafting the pattern last night. So far it’s proving to be a bit frustrating scaling it up from the original size. I tried my scaled up version in muslin and it was waaaay too big. So, I’m going to try a muslin of the original size and then drape it to my dress form. Hopefully that will work better. It’s very strange working with such a loose pattern design. I’m used to fitting everything very tightly around stays. This time things are meant to be billowy and loose. Anyway, here are the pictures of the concept.

IMG_0003 The dress… I just love the petal skirt.

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The pattern. It’s not too complicated once you figure out how the pieces fit together. The hard part is scaling the triangular points.

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The fabric… It’s a blue cotton voile that I’ve had in my stash for over a year. I hope I have enough to make it. Luckily, it’s still a good fabric so I can get more if I need to.

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Here is the original dress. It is the orange gown on the left.

Well, I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your weekend. God Bless!

Love Lauren

1 Witty Sentiments:

MrsC (Maryanne) said...

Oh billowy things are SO hard to scale! Also the weight and texture of the fabric is a huge clincher. The original is probably silk chiffon or georgette(I haven't time to pop downstairs and check my copy) which is so fine, the extra fullness would just behave fabulously. A muslin of the same volume would look heinous. I think your cotton voile will need to be less full than the original definitely. All the best!