miserable & magical

Oh hi!

I don’t have a lot to post this week despite doing a LOT of work.

I got most of the blouse embroidery done. I say “most” because I haven’t done the flowers, and I realized after finishing the first sleeve, I didn’t do enough sequins. So I’ve got to add more sequins to one, flowers to both (I don’t think I’m going to do any of the torso section) – and then I can assemble everything there.

I love how it looks like its melting off the dressform LOL. I haven’t ironed any of after working on them but you get the idea.

She would not look at me for this photo LOL

Sunday I thought she was just hanging around my sewing room to beg for food she already has. Turns out she was waiting on the sun to hit the skylights because as soon as they did and she had some square sunny spots to lay in, she was immediately over there. I should’ve done a time lapse of her moving to stay in the squares throughout the afternoon.

Anyway back to the blouse embroidery. Realized I didn’t have a good color for the flower petals so I had to order that, and also needed the beads for the center. So I put that on pause and Friday moved onto getting the skirt prepped for embroidery.

As of Friday afternoon I just had a bunch of skirt panels. A couple were basted together. I didn’t think it would take me THAT long to get it assembled. It took ALL WEEKEND.

Friday I got those seams that I’d already basted together finished with french seams because I don’t want any raw edges in there. That took longer than expected because I had to go slow with this fabric. Saturday I just had to get the 4 back panels on. Which turned out to be tricky – 2 of my back panels were too short so I made an extension for them at the top (will hide that seam with some embroidery, hopefully). Trying to wrap my brain around how to pin those back panels onto the existing front panels for french seams while also making sure my extension seam would end up on the interior was… mind boggling. And of course I did the first one wrong. Completely wrong, as in start to finish and pressed and only then did I notice it was wrong. Had to fully take it apart and start it over. So it took me all of my working time on Saturday just doing that (ran some errands in the morning, and that evening went and got mexican for dinner, went to the bookstore, trader joes and the container store, so I wasn’t working ALLL day.)

Sunday, however, I DID work all day. Got up at 9 and got to it because I was bound and determined to get this skirt done and ready for embroidery for today. I did not realize it would truly take me ALL day.

Got it all gathered and basted onto my waistband, and put it over my Snow White skirt as a guide for length. Trying to get these skirt panels leveled off at the bottom was a huge headache. Why didn’t I do a straight waistband so I could just measure and trim off the excess at the bottom? Because I cut this as a bunch of circle skirt panels and in order to get the crinkle going the right direction, I ended up with the center of each panel being too short. By making a waistband that follows the curve of the bodice, I was at least able to lower the front to be the right length, and the sides were close enough. The back is still an issue, but I’m just going to take it up once I finish that back seam so the “too short” pieces get removed. It’s only about 4 inches of width at the bottom.

But that meant trimming the excess off was incredibly frustrating. I put it up on the table so I could look at all easier, and would lay a 6 inch segment on a box and pin it, and then let that section hang and see how much it needed to be raised or let down. Once I had it all pinned up, I marked a line across it all to show me where to trim. Unfortunately the pencil I used to mark this went through all the layers so now I have little brown marks to hide at the bottom edge, fun.

Finally got it all leveled.

My plan for hemming is to just fold it up once and do a tiny little baby hem on the machine, then fold it again and finish that part by hand. I started trying to pin this first fold, but it was a pain in the butt, so I just sat down at the machine and did the folding as I went. It took me an HOURRRRR sitting at the machine to hem all this.

That’s where I left it last night, because by that point I’d been working from 9:30am to 9:10pm (a break for lunch, snack, nap and dinner in there), and I was over it.

With that first hem in it looks exactly how I wanted. I wish my dressform hadn’t shrunk before I took this photo so you got a better visual of it.

Tonight I’ll be pinning the hem for finishing it by hand, and getting started on that, and probably doing that tomorrow too. Hopefully can start embroidery Wednesday.

Three day weekend this week! Hopefully I can get a lot done. My goal is to focus on embroidery during the week and other things over the weekends – I need to finish getting the outer corset layer finished so I can start embroidery there. I can pattern the cape this weekend. Maybe get the flowers on the blouse done so I can get that assembled? I also need to do a duct tape dummy for Morticia.

Last week while working on the last sleeve, I switched to my biggest embroidery hoop and I think that helped a lot, because I got that second sleeve done much faster than the first. Not having to constantly reposition the fabric and just having a big area to focus on. I need to find a good thing to “watch” while I’m doing this. Something I don’t have to keep my eyes on but will give me hours of entertainment. Parks and Rec rewatch? Friends? I just did a Rupaul rewatch not too long…. maybe I’ll rewatch the last few seasons because I’ve only seen those once or twice. When I did Bespin it was podcasts (I was new to podcasts so I had a lot of catching up to do) and Unsolved Mysteries. We’ll see.

Goals for this week:
-get skirt hemmed
-start skirt embroidery
-finish blouse embroidery
-assemble blouse
-cape mockup/patterning
-Morticia duct tape dummy