Week 3: Getting there slowly

 This has been a pretty slow week. As Mia and Becky and everyone with any big brain energy predicted, the sewing with the new slippery fabric is far more tricky to work with than the muslin. As a result, though I was hoping to finish most of the final dress this week, I only have approximately the upper third. 

Figure 1: the upper 30%

I do have some good adventures to share, though! Firstly, though the fabric is hard to work with (and the lines are surprisingly more difficult to make straight than the muslin), after being pressed, the result is GORGEOUS. Take a look at this awesome neckline:

Figure 2: beautiful and clean 

In terms of the process, as previously predicted, even the cutting part of the process was also significantly more difficult than I expected. I ended up using way more pins than the first time, as evidenced by Maxine’s new outfit:

Figure 3: porcupine dozer?

She was also joined by Otto, her new cold-weather loving friend, who was forced out of his summer hibernation to help her with the momentous task of carrying my senior project:

Figure 4: Otto!

Anyways, one thing I noticed while cutting is that this fabric frays a lot. On the inside neck facing, I’m asked to “finish” the outer edge, which simply means to make it so it doesn’t bother your skin and doesn’t come apart on you. On the previous dress, I did something called “pinking”, which is basically a zig zag snip snip along the edge:

Figure 5: Pinking, which is a name that makes absolutely 0 sense to me  

This time I was a little more worried about the fraying so I did an actual hem:

It looks soooo much more professional and I actually love how this came out! That brings me to another issue: I didn’t use interfacing in round 1, but I did for this fabric in order to add more structure and firmness to some of the parts. All that is is an iron-on piece of funny mesh that’s a little stiff. However, since the interfacing doesn’t have any stretch and the fabric I’m using has a tiny bit, I ended up with some slight problems sewing the interfaced part and the only-fabric part of the neckline together. I don’t think it’ll be a problem? But we shall see! 

I was originally hoping that I’d be able to get the dress done this week and do an extra smaller project next week, but since senior projects technically end on Friday, I won’t get that weekend to get the bulk of my work done. Instead, it looks like I’ll just be finishing this dress. Honestly, I’m not disappointed. I’ll be achieving pretty much everything I set out to do, although my pattern changed from the cool organza one to a slightly (very slightly) less cool flowy one. I still made a muslin mock-up and learned about how my fabric type can change my process; I struggled through some tricky sewing pattern things, and didn’t do very much making-things-up-as-I-go, and I had fun sewing! I am still planning to wear this dress for graduation, but who knows?

This project ended up being way more involved than I originally thought - I did not expect it to take a whole week for the muslin itself. Perhaps that was naive of me, but I suppose that’s part of senior projects: tackling our assumptions and working towards a more complete understanding of a small part of the world.