Week 2: Halfway (already????)

 Oh, how time flies. 

The bad news: Things are going a little more slowly than I expected. It's astounding to me how easy it is to put together the general shape of the dress, but what takes an incredible amount of time is getting from that general shape to the finished shape. Who could've known? A lot of this trouble comes from trying to get the edges of the fabric to look professional and finished, without having any thread actually showing. 

Here's an example: 

Figure 1: hey, look! it's already taking shape! that was easy.

Here's a picture of the pieces of the bodice, having been sewn together in a shape that already looks pretty bodice-like. (This is also a picture of the ducttape and bubble-wrap mannequin I made for myself in lieu of an actual dress form.) 

Figure 2: about 5 hours of work later... looks just a little nicer

Above is a picture of the "completed" bodice. It doesn't look like a whole lot of improvement, but I'm actually really satisfied with the results. We (me + the instruction writers) accomplished this cool, seamless neckline and waistline by adding a few totally redundant pieces of fabric, complexly attaching them to the neckline, and folding + pressing them in. If I had been ad libbing this dress myself, as per our usual arrangement, I would have folded in the raw edge of the neckline and sewn along the edges, leaving a rather ugly seam running along the edge. The midriff band is also super clean and tucks everything in really nicely. 

For a better view, here's a picture of the bodice inside out:

Figure 3: they did surgery on a dress

It's a little hard to decipher, but you can see the facing (that's just what they call the "redundant" fabric that helps hide stuff) on the neckline and the midriff. Again, if I'd been sewing this myself, I would've just worried about how the dress looked on the outside, but when you connect a lot of different pieces of fabric, there's a lot of rough edges that tend to congregate around the centers of things. On this pattern, there's an extra "redundant" piece of fabric on the inside of the midriff that protects my own belly from those harsh edges. It's really pretty nifty. 

You can see that I used contrasting thread so I can see the lines (and mistakes) on this mockup, but on the outside (See Figure 2) you really can't see the thread at all, because all the seam are so nicely hidden. Magic!

I experienced similar trickery in the corners of the sleeves, where the pattern asked me to create a "miter", which is basically just how to tuck in a corner to make it look nice and clean. 

Figure 4: mitered corner

This is the inside of the lower sleeve corner, and it looks... impeccable? This was super satisfying to sew because of how clean and beautiful it turned out. 

As a sidenote, I added in the little orange flowers while my family watched documentaries about Asian-American history together. It's been a busy week.

The good news: 

I finished the whole muslin mockup this week! Look at me! I look like a wizard-fairy-angel thing. 

Figure 5, 6: i only caption my figures like this thanks to science lab report guidelines

I'm so happy with this dress! The sleeves are super cool and the neckline is just the right depth for me. I'm really really excited to see how it turns out with the fabric I picked out for the actual version of this dress:

Figure 7:  m a r b l e

Fun fact: I was looking at this fabric for a different project, a jumpsuit, but decided it was too bold to wear full-length. But I couldn't let go of this fabric, so I went looking for a pattern specifically to fit the fabric, and that's the one I'm working on right now. 

I'm really excited to get started on the actual dress! In the meantime, here's some bonus material to ponder:

Figure 8: Maxine or Benny?

It turns out that dozers are great pincushions. I originally thought this lil guy's name was Maxine, but now I'm thinking Benny also suits him/her really well. What do y'all think?