Making Moana Part 2: Continuing the Top and Sash
Welcome back! Click here to go to Part 1, where I began Moana’s top and sash! Today I’ll show you the progress I made with the embroidery, and how to finish up the embellishments!
Once the embroidery is finished on the sash and the upper flap of her bodice, it’s time to pin the good sides together and sew! Make sure that you press your seams after you turn each piece right-side out.
Here is the upper flap pinned:
Here are the upper flap and the sash after sewing and pressing the seams:
Last time I had discussed that my plan was the iron what would normally be the center back seam on the front, as Moana has either a fold or seam in the middle of her sash:
I finished up the ends of the sash with a simple rolled hem, but you could most definitely fold the ends over and sew them shut as well. Voila! The sash is complete!
Now for the rest of the top! Moana has a sort of geometric brown lace trimming the upper flap:
I would be incredibly surprised if this was commercially available somehow. I thought about how I was going to make this for the longest time when luck intervened! I found this somewhat similar looking geometric lace in the clearance bin at Joanns!!
As you can see my original plan was to dye it brown, which I did attempt, aaaaaand managed to turn it orange!! :(
So on to Plan B!!! Use a sharpie and color it in!
The added benefit of coloring it with a sharpie is that this made the lace quite stiff, which is perfect for this part of the bodice. Ah, much better!!
I pinned one line of lace, triangles pointing down, to the lower edge of the flap and attached it with a straight stitch. Here it is:
Now it could be left like this, but if you reference the pictures, Moana’s lace has intermittent triangles that poke up from the lace ever now and again, so I took the lace I had left and cut out every other triangle (you can see this side hadn’t been sharpie’d yet when I made the cuts):
Once I finished coloring it in, I pinned and attached it directly on top of the first layer of lace, so now it looks like this!
Much better, in my humble opinion!! Don’t forget to fray check the raw ends of the lace that were cut!
Now, on to the shell border. I had a very difficult time finding shells that were like Moana’s in the movie, which look almost like little white coffee beans. Since I’m on a bit of a time crunch, I ended up getting white puka shells that already had a hole drilled in them on Amazon. I separated these shells into a small shell bin and a large shell bin. The small shells I will try to reserve for the skinnier parts of the flap and the large ones for where I have more room. I’ll be using brown embroidery thread to stitch the shells on, so that hopefully the thread is a bit more noticeable!
Not going to lie guys, this part was a serious pain in the butt!! I did one row at a time. I’m not sure if that made it any easier, honestly!! XD
Here are the finished rows:
I did put a dab of fabric glue under each shell to try and secure them. It seems to be holding just fine so far.
The last thing I’ll discuss for this part of the tutorial is the lining, which I had set aside up until this point. Since the embellishments are nearly done, it’s almost time to put the entire top together! Yay! :) I want my model to be able to wear the top bra-less and not have to worry about support, so I did sew boning channels into the seam allowances of the lining, and added a light, shaped boning to it. You can see the channels sewn in here:
With the lining taken care of, it’s time to finish this bodice up! See you guys in part 3! :)
