I’ve been having trouble with the seams on the skirt puckering. I sewed the skirt seams like I normally do satin and they looked – fine. Not fantastic, but very minimal puckering. Passable. I finished the interior seams same way as I did on the bodice and the puckering went up by about 50%. Now they don’t look so good. I tried all kinds of little tricks to help, but nothing short of completely undoing 5 hours of work and going blind unpicking seams is going to fix it at this point, I think. This fabric is just picky picky. I have one more trick up my sleeve, otherwise I may just leave it and hide the seams in the pleats as much as I can.
After my experiments I figured out what I should have done in the first place (had I realized this was going to happen) and enacted that on my front hem, and stabilized it before sewing it. Turned out gorgeous. THAT’S what I’d have to do on the 8 other seams and I really don’t want to have to go back and unpick them all, stabilize and resew. Ugh! I’m conflicted.
Anyway, here’s the dress last night when I started to work. I’m having to keep the dressform in the bedroom while working on it, because when the dress is on in my office, there’s no room for me to work LOL
The front. Everything is just kinda pinned back together slap-dash, and that combined with my tilting dressform makes it look like she’s drunk.
I got the BACK pieces of my underskirt basically put together. I moved them around to the front for the photo, just to see what it was going to look like.
I spent the bulk of the night fooling around with those dumb seams, of course, but I also hemmed the entire beast. I think it’s funny that was laughing about how quickly the skirt initially came together – since then I’ve dumped about 8 hours worth of work into it. More if I have to redo those seams.
Here’s a non-flash closeup of the front, so you can see the pattern a bit better.
I’m taking a bit of a break from her this weekend since we’re going out of town. Since I have a 3 day weekend next week, I reeeeally want to try to finish it. I’ve been into this kind of crazy-possessed work rage for a month or so – like, don’t bother me, don’t ask me to go out, don’t ask me to do anything that doesn’t involve sewing. I mean, I’m kinda always like that in the summer, but never to this extreme. Like, don’t even ask me to go to a 4th of July BBQ. That’s good sewing time.
Anyway, next up on the to-do list:
1. keep playing with dress seams
2. create front piece for bodice
3. pleat and attach skirt to bodice
4. create back piece to cover the lacing on the back
5. cover buttons for back piece
6. Finish underskirt
7. start messing with undersleeves…. etc.