For My Next Trick...
It’s January, and the afterglow of the wedding has finally subsided. We got all of our souvenir stuff shadowboxed and up on the wall, the Wedding Albums came in in time for Christmas Gifting, and my husband and I are working feverishly on launching our company this year. (Not sewing related, sadly). I didn’t get a ton of sewing done after the wedding. I completed a few swap items, made a quilt for some friends that had blocks embroidered with dragons on it (my personal favorite post-wedding project), and made some cute opulent stockings for our first Christmas in our house.
The finished Dragon Quilt top...pattern is Aria Lane’s Concerto Quilt
The Opulent Stockings were hung by the chimney with care...
Now I am faced with a month of free time to knock out my upcoming swaps (that I will hopefully be taking a break from after I’m done with these...but that seems unlikely...) and sewing one more couture garment for a black tie wedding we’re attending on February 27th. Oh...and losing the 13 lbs I’ve gained since the wedding.
MY BLACK TIE GARMENT
Meet the Patricia Gown from Caroline Deene. I saw these pictures of the dress on Pinterest, and got all the deets on it from Rent the Runway.
This. Dress. Is. Gorge. And it will use a lot of the same skills I learned making my wedding dress...but will require one MAJOR alteration. I cannot wear empire waists. My tummy doesn’t need any more help looking bulbous thankyouverymuch. So, I’m going to lower the waistband to my natural waist, and I think the slit probably shouldn’t go up quite that high on me. I’m going to a wedding, after all. I don’t need to be taking attention away from the bride (who on her worst day is still one of the most beautiful women I know.) And now that I have a bodice muslined, I can skip all of that process and save myself a boatload of time. (Since the wedding dress, I cannot advocate enough for muslining. And for keeping your muslins to use again in later projects. Lots of time investment up front, but will save so many headaches and so much time down the road.) Although I might go for steel boning this time to test it out. I’m going to head down to Fabric Mecca later today to check out the selection of lace and embroidered tulle. And I think I’ll use Silk Organza for the underlining this time...the tulle in my wedding dress worked, but if I had known better I would have gone with the organza.
I spent some time rifling through my pattern stash only to find that I don’t have an evening dress pattern that I could use to engineer a replica of this dress. Enter: McCall’s.
Hello M6893! This has all the variation I need! I’m going to take the bodice of view D, lengthen the sleeve to full from three-quarter, and stick it on the skirt in views A and B. Here are the sketches of both views:
Then, I’ll just cut a slit in the skirt and we’ll call it good! It looks like in the line drawing, views A and B even have the button-up back. I think I’ll go with something a little more delicate than the commercial gown, itself. To me, those satin button loops look a bit bulky, but we’ll see as we go.
SWAP PLANNING
And on the other end of the spectrum, we have my mini-quilt swaps...SO MANY MINI-QUILT SWAPS...that I have committed to. Take a look at the spreadsheet I use to keep my sewing organized:
Everything is coming up back-to-back-to-back! The good news is that I am a much faster quilter than I am garment sewer, and I think it’s because I do a LOT of paper piecing. (Also, no kids.)
So, that’s that. My first blog update of 2016. I’m off to try and knock out all these mini quilts. By my calculations, they should be done by the 25th, but we’ll see...