Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Checkered Alice

First let me say I am sorry for the somewhat abandoning of this blog. I don't sit around and sew all day, though I would like to and do sometimes, and life has just thrown me several other projects to work on that have absolutely nothing to do with sewing.

So while I did complete the project that was shown in the "Sneak Peak" it remains un-"finished" in my mind, due to some closure issues. But this poor little blog deserves some love and I intend to give it.

Actually this morning I was struck by the idea of expanding the scope of this blog. For while I don't physically sew everyday of my life, costuming and my particular brand of fashion does manage to worm it's way in on a constant basis. With that thought I might start posting on hair, make-up, good places to find neat fashion/costume stuff etc. I don't know if anyone would be interested, hell I'm not even sure if anyone outside of my particular ring of friends reads this, but it may amuse me so I'll probably give it a try.

But enough of that onto the Checkered Alice Dress.

Using Butterick's 4790, a dress in their Retro line & really a great little dress. I have made the dress to pattern before, and found the back underwrap to be awkward, plus I wanted more volume for this dress and it seemed a perfect place to add a built in petticoat.

For fabric I was using a heirloom quilt top that my grandmother had given me, her best guess was that her grandmother had made it. The reason I felt ok with cutting it up for this project, as it was a HANDSEWN extremely large quilt top, was that it was pretty irreparably damaged. Large stains, fading in many of the squares, holes and tears. BUT there was enough that was little damaged to cut out a pattern.

So I did.



Let me take this moment to give a PSA to any new person making clothes from patterns. They do not come in your size, unless you are a very very lucky person. Your department store size is not the size of the pattern you need to cut out. Pattern companies use a completely different set of standards and measurements for their "sizes" than ready-wear clothes. This lets you see how ridiculous our size system is in the first place but that's a different story.

I'll illustrate. THIS is Butterick's Misses size chart, it's what most of their patterns are run off of. For the sake of clarity I will disclose that I am a 5'4" 36" 32" 38", I wear a size 8-10 in ready-wear, and by Butterrick's chart and directions I should buy and cut out the size 14. (You see how going in and buying/making your ready-wear size would get you in trouble?) By looking at these numbers you would think I have very little fitting to do in most patterns. While I certainly have less fitting issues than most people, these patterns still don't fit me.

Unlike Butterick's advice to fit your bust and then add where needed, I tend to do with the rule of fit to the largest part of you and then adjust the rest. It is extremely difficult (for me at least) to calculate how and where to ADD fabric to a pattern. Whereas with a friend and a handful of pins it is much easier to figure out where to take it off. The moral of this story is experimentation is your friend, and don't think it's going to fit just cuz the paper tells you so.

As I said, I have made this dress before, and in doing that I remember the alterations I needed to make. Namely that while I do have a 36" bust, I do not have the linebacker shoulders that Butterick assumes someone with a bust that size has.
So from the get go I cut the shoulders to a smaller size, TWO sizes smaller (this is important remember this).



The contrast to this lovely checkered pattern, is a delicious cherry red corduroy. Herein is another little PSA for ya'll, always measure how much fabric you have when pulling from your stash BEFORE you start making the dress.

The dress called for a circle skirt. I however only had one-half of a circle skirt worth of red corduroy. And my "extra corduroy" was ina slightly darker shade of red to make it unworkable. Doi!



What's a girl to do? I'm on a deadline, so there is no time to run out to the store and see if maybe I can find matching corduroy. After much finger biting, a snack, and some fast thinking. I decide to see if I can get another half circle out of the quilt top. And lo' and behold I can!

This dress has really straight foward construction so I won't bore you with that. Instead here is what the dress looks like from the front.



Aaannnd the back.



Now. Note, all that fabric hanging down in the back. Yeah that wasn't suppose to happen. The added weight to the petticoat dragged the back down. I fixed that by tightening up where the wraps attached.

Another problem with the dress was,despite having cut the shoulder TWO sizes smaller they were still too large.



I had to take off another full inch on either side! According to the world at large I have no shoulders but I swear they are there!

The other big issue has been the closure. The first closure was some D-rings meant to be a lace up style, but well that turned out very ugly.



Next and currently there is a single large button. But there is too much pull on the buttonhole. I'm thinking of turning back the edges further, and putting lacing rings on the interior. But that will just have to wait till another time.

:)