Take off your dress, and send it to me

[venta]

As mentioned briefly on here a few weeks back, I was shopping for fabric and patterns. Having done very little dressmaking in the last decade, I decided a good place to start was making a dress for a friend's one-year-old daughter. The little girl herself isn't expressing clothes-based opinions much yet, so I went with something I thought her mum would like: a rather old-fashioned party dress.

So, acting on advice from various people (thanks!) I took myself off to Goldhawk Road, intending to purchase some nice snuggly brushed cotton, or some patterned needlecord. Only, do you know what? Such things are right out of fashion. The only needlecord I could find was ugly, or stiff, or both ("nee-del-cor?" repeated the staff in one shop, clearly completely at a loss). Brushed cotton only existed in dead-plain shades that didn't really appeal. In the end, I abandoned all pretence of practicality and bought some soft, silky velvet. The thought process went: ooh, silky fabric, that will be nice and soft on a baby's skin. The thought process should have gone: ooh, silky, slithery fabric, that will be a complete sod to sew.

When flicking through patterns, I'd rejected a number of them. Sleeveless? Who wants a sleeveless winter dress? Lots of them were basically the same shape, rather simple and not that pretty. Of course, the thought process here should have been along the lines of... simple, yes, simple is good. You are rather out of practice at this sewing lark. And have you ever set sleeves? No, you haven't. Or made something with a collar? No.

Y'see, my mum made a lot of my clothes (and indeed hers, and my dad's) when I was growing up. I have a touching belief that to create clothes, all you need is to purchase a pattern and some appropriate fabric. I regularly fail to take into account that my belief in my own dressmaking abilities has always massively outstripped my actual abilities.

Somehow I managed to lose the power supply for my sewing machine in a housemove four years ago, and have only just got a new one. Only, on unpacking, it turned out (a) not to be actually made up, and required some dismantling and wiring up to join the various cables and foot pedal together. And (b) it doesn't have a UK plug on it, it has one of those two-pin jobs that you can safely plug into a UK socket so long as you jam a doorkey into the earth to knock the gates off[*]. Anyway, the thing powered up and seemed to sew.

So, I read through the pattern. And panicked a bit because of course the instructions made no sense at all. The dress is so old-fashioned, in fact, it comes with matching pants. I'd make those first, because they looked a lot easier. But I might as well do all the cutting-out at once.

Problem the first: silky, slithery fabric? With a nap? It sticks to itself. And slithers. Just getting the wretched stuff to lie flat on the table, folded over, so I could lay out the pattern was a nightmare. Even after some time of straightening and smoothing and patting, I hadn't managed it (which would become apparent later when the pattern pieces didn't match up and didn't have straight edges). And despite being perfectly aware of the problem, I forgot to check which way the velvet stroked when I laid the pattern out. In defiance of all narrative law, I happened to get it right way round by chance.

Anyway, I put the pants together. Problem the second: you can't really press velvet. 'Turn under 1/4" and press' works beautifully on nice crisp cotton, but less well for thicker, fuzzier fabric. The hems for the elasticated waist and legs were three long battles to get them pinned into place. Eventually, I sewed the waist up. And then realised I'd got so carried away with my seam that I hadn't left a gap to actually put the damn elastic through. Rookie error! I unpicked, threaded the elastic, sewed up... and then realised the vital importance of checking that there are no twists in the elastic before sewing up. Aargh, what was I thinking?

Also, problem the third: fuzzy fabric, like velvet, frays. Repeated unpickings basically destroy the material. You ain't got that many chances.

Considerably daunted, I started on the dress. At which point my sewing machine went vaguely beserk and tried to eat things. Dismantling, cleaning, oiling and shouting ensued until it agreed to play nice. And why exactly do Singer supply a screwdriver to remove the needleplate when the screwdriver's handle doesn't bloody fit in the gap? And while we're on that topic, why does my sewing machine not have a 5/8" line on the needleplate? Or any lines at all? And why have I never noticed this before? For any non-sewers reading, this is basically like discovering your phone has no numbers on the buttons. Perfectly usable, but vastly less convenient.

Anyway, I got the body of the dress together. And used the zipper foot for my machine for the first time - which is weird, because I know perfectly well that the last thing I made had a zip in it. Must learn how to tidy things with the ends of zips.

And I reached the really incomprehensible bit of the pattern, where you put the collar on. I'd made the collar, and made it again because (see problem the first) I'd cut it out all wonky and it was very asymmetric. Then there was a couple of steps that were just, like, words and a picture that looked like nothing on earth. And some bias binding needed to get involved. Single-fold bias binding, so called because it has two folds in it. They don't like to make this stuff easy.

Anyway, after finding a YouTube tutorial it suddenly mostly fitted into place and I got the collar on. Late in life, I have learned the wisdom of tacking first to see if it looks completely rubbish (it did, I took it off and did it again and then sewed it for real). And sleeves turn out to be not that hard. At least not compared to some of the other stuff.

Like many jobs, once you've done all that you get to the "just the finishing" stage. Which is, of course, way more time-consuming and fiddly than you've remembered.

However! It is finished. With only two slightly panicking phonecalls to exspelunca for advice (or three if you count the one where she was out and I had to replace her with YouTube). And the dress did not, as I feared at times, have to be consigned to the rubbish bin of history and never spoken of again. It did take hugely longer than I expected, though at least part of that is that number of things I had to do multiple times to get them right. And all that turn-under-1/4"-ing.

It's not the dress I hoped to make, being rather more lopsided in places than you'd want ideally. I shall hand it over with a suitable number of caveats :)



(Yes, it is artfully arranged to disguise the lopsidedness ;)

Conclusions: I should do more dressmaking, but I should make something simpler next time.

[*] Unless you are the mother, in which case I absolutely didn't do this. I bought an adaptor.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Goldhawk Road was amazing, in that I've never seen so many fabric shops all at once. And they did have some lovely raw silks, and such, the like of which you don't normally see in John Lewis. But there were relatively few fabrics that made me go "wow, I want some of that!" And there were quite a few that made me go "why would you want some of that??"

I mark dots and things with thread, mostly because that's how my mum does it. Do you dot the wrong side, or both? (I'm thinking quite often you end up matching dots on the right side, but that getting the dot in the correct place might be hard?)

And surely all will be forgiven for a silver velvet dress?

I am genuinely unsure what sort of standards people expect from homemade stuff. I think it looks very shonky close up (and the inside is something of a horror, because it turns out I don't have any pinking shears. Or, rather, I do but on reflection they are the ones my mum threw out as blunt in about 1981, and I adopted them for cutting twiddly edges on paper. Not sure how they made it into my sewing box, but they just chew fabric...)

So I hope the intended recipient will be pleased - if nothing else, I hope she'll appreciate the effort even if it's not a terribly glamorous result!