Summer Vacation Begins

Today was the first day I worked on the dress with two of the kids at home. (The eldest two.) I still got a bit jittery whenever they would go near the dress - "Are your hands clean?" "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!" - and my heart skipped a beat at one moment when Hugh absent-mindedly picked up a pair of scissors lying near the lace on the table. However, overall it went well, and I was able to get a good chunk of sewing done. It wasn't as focussed as my kid-free day sewing sessions have been, but still productive. The end of phase one of the lace sewing is in sight.

Hours: 4
Task: continue working on side back seam
Entertainment: Persuasion; "Writers and Company" on CBC Radio One; watching the kids play "Super Mario Galaxy 2"

Brad and Karine both phoned independently while I was working on the dress, and listening to Neva talk to her Uncle Brad was entertainment in and of itself.

After consultation with Karine today, I think we're going to change the structure of the dress a bit - we're going to make an interior corset for fit and do a zipper up the back. (Originally we had planned to do a corset on the outside of the back, but now there is some discussion of doing a contrasting-coloured band around the waist, which I just don't think will go with an exterior corset back. I think overall this will be a better solution - the corset can be more functional and less decorative; the zipper will look more polished than a corset back; and it gives us more choices about what to do with the accent band.

I also had Jeffy take a picture of me working on the dress. This is a pretty accurate representation of what the dressmaking has been like for me so far.


Really, if you're going to spend hours and hours hand-sewing lace, isn't this a pretty nice place to do it?

June 25 & 28

Two days I had hoped to spend the full days working on the dress; both days got shortened, for different reasons. Friday I drove everyone in to school, but got home to discover Neva had forgotten her towel and clean underwear to use after their trip to the water park, so I drove that stuff in to her. Between that and doing laundry and making appointments and organizing the household, I didn't get started on the dress until 11:30am. Thankfully, Jeffy picked the kids up from school, which meant I got an extra hour or so of sewing in. Monday I had fewer household tasks to do and so got more accomplished, but still less than I was hoping for. And now school is out for the summer. I hope Neva and Hugh consider "Mommy doing some sewing" as a fun summertime activity.

June 25:
Hours: 4
Task: side back seam
Entertainment: The Fellowship of the Rings: Disc Two; The Two Towers: Disc One

June 28:
Hours: 4
Task: finished one side back seam; began other one
Entertainment: The Two Towers: Disc Two; The Return of the King: Disc One

Distracted

This week, I had hoped to spend all day Wednesday and Friday working on the dress. However, both days I ended up getting sidetracked by other tasks: Wednesday Crystal came over and I helped her hem five karate uniforms; Friday I went to Fabricland to get some fabric to make an infant sling for Kyle and when I got home I did laundry and made phone calls and... well. Just did all of the tiny little things that are required when you run a household of six. So both days it was noon-ish before I sat down to do the dress, which gave me only a couple of hours of working time before I had to go in to pick up the kids from school and daycare. *sigh* Ah well. A few hours is better than no hours, and I definitely did get some things accomplished:

June 16:
Hours: 2.5
Task: Stitching small seams on back two skirt pieces
Entertainment: The Tudors

June 18:
Hours: 2
Task: Working on side back seam - 14" accomplished
Entertainment: The Fellowship of the Ring, Disc One

Usually after a day of sewing, there are little beads all over the place. I do my best to keep them contained, but some of them invariably end up on the table or floor. Apparently today, as Jeffy was picking at the bits of rice left on the table after supper, he inadvertently ate one of the cylindrical beads, thinking it was some rice. This dress is a family affair.

Next week is dentist week at our house, so my first available date for dress sewing will be Friday. My hope is to get all of my errands and tasks done early in the week so I can truly spend the whole day sewing. Fingers crossed!

June 4

(The previous posts here have been about the process of making the dress. My goal at this point is to record more details about the progress of the dress and what gets done each time I sit down to work on it. I hope this part doesn't get too boring.)

Hours: 5
Tasks: hand-stitching right side seam
Entertainment: The Tudors

Kids were at daycare and school. My goal was to finish the Right Side Back seam, which I did. I also decided to start this blog as a record of the work that's going in to the dress.

I have one more day-at-home to work on the dress before I go to Prince George for a few days. The cleaning service will be here, which sometimes makes it tricky to get very much done, but I still hope to get a couple of short seams on the backs of the lace skirt parts done.

Sewing the Lace

After the lace was cut, there was nothing to do but to start sewing. I started with the skirt, since the bodice would have to be quite fitted and I figured I'd start with something that could handle the odd mistake as I got my "lace fingers" trained up.

I started with the centre front skirt, and sewed one of the side front skirts on. The process was long, certainly, but actually quite fun as each bit of the seam is like a puzzle: how can I stitch these two pieces together to make a seamless-looking result?

I laid one piece of lace on top of the other, matching the basting lines for the seam. Then I stitched the two pieces of lace together along the embroidered lace. The top bits of the skirt were match to each other (as much as possible) so they were straightforward, but as the seam continued down, it required more "playing" with the patterns to make a seamless look.

Here's how the seam looks before it's been sewn:


And after:


People who have seen the lace have said how seamless it looks; some even wondered if it was all one piece. This is exactly the look I was hoping for, so it's gratifying to know that it's working. The only down side is that I think it takes about 8 hours to sew each seam, which means that there's quite a lot of work involved. However, it's going to look beautiful and professional, and I'm very happy to make such a special item for Karine and Brad's special day.

The Process So Far

Karine and I went dress shopping in St. Catharines in July 2009 while we were in Niagara Falls for the annual Sheldrake family reunion. We found a couple of styles we liked, and decided to go from there.

In the Fall of 2009, we bought the pattern and then went to buy the fabric and a shop Nancy had recommended. Karine found a lace that she liked, and the silk to go underneath it there. I bought the rest of the materials and notions at Fabricland.


I first spent some time making a muslin mock-up of the dress, which we fitted in the fall and then again in February 2010. Once the muslin was fitting right, I used it to make three sets of pattern pieces: one for the lace, one for the silk underlay, and one for the lining.

Then came the moment of truth: I had to cut the lace. I'd be lying if I said this was stress-free; in fact, I laid it all out one day on the floor of our living room, but just couldn't bring myself to cut it. Part of the reason I was so reluctant was that it cost $100 per metre, and we had four metres, so any mistakes would be very, very costly. Another part of the reason was that I wasn't 100% sure exactly how I was going to sew this beautiful lace, and the manner it gets sewn in makes a difference in how it gets cut. So I put the lace away, and put the pattern away, and started doing some research.

My main reference was a book called Couture Sewing Techniques by Claire Schaeffer, which had excellent information about how to sew high-quality garments of all kinds. The bits it had on lace were extremely helpful, but it became clear that I was going to need to sew this lace together by hand. There were a couple of reasons for this: 1) the lace had quite a bit of open space, so any machine-sewn seams would really stand out, and 2) the lace is heavily beaded, which makes machine sewing difficult unless you remove all of the beads at the seamlines and then re-bead the seams after they've been sewn. It just made more sense to sew the whole thing by hand. This was I could achieve a seamless look on the lace, and the dress would be as beautiful as Karine and I hoped.

Once I figured out how to sew the lace together, I laid the lace out, pinned the pattern pieces on, took several very deep breaths... and didn't cut! Not yet! I had learned from the sewing book that I needed to baste around the pattern pieces in a contrasting colour to delineate the edges of the pattern pieces, and then cut around the basting lines as widely as possible to allow for lots of overlap in the pieces. After I had basted the pattern onto the lace, THEN I cut. (I had already cut the scalloped edge of the lace off to use around the hem and neckline of the dress.) I wish I'd taken a picture at this point, but the image of the lace lying in a single layer on our living room floor with the pattern pieces on top will stay with me for a long, long time.

The Beginning

So, obviously "the beginning" was when Brad and Karine got engaged in September 2008. I offered to make her dress, quite frankly, because I really love making wedding dresses. They're so unique and different and they really seem like a sewing "event."

I've made three wedding dresses before this one:

* my own - a short silk dupioni and silk charmeuse dress with painted detail around the hem and neck, and with a large ball-gown style skirt which I wore for the ceremony;

* Christina's - a short silvery, empire waist dress for the day she married Bri at the cottage; and,

* Sarah's - a two-piece cream dress (lace corset with an a-line skirt) for her anglican ceremony with Huss.

I also offered to make Urs' dress for her wedding to Gerry last August, but was foiled by Ewan's arrival. (I wisely figured that parenting an infant would take up most of my time and I wouldn't have much left over for dressmaking. I was right.)

In any case: Karine seemed excited about having me make the dress, and I assured her that I would be happy to make her whatever kind of dress she wanted. So we made plans to do some shopping together and looking at styles, and this wedding dress creation process began.