Rose Ribbon Embroidery "Mini" Projects (for BABY NYFW) Part 1: Kumya JSK
I decided semi-last minute to attend BABY's fashion show at NYFW!
BABY had mentioned in their NYFW brand description that their newest collection would be a return to their origins, as well as presenting archival items.
You have to dress to impress for NYFW, right? So of course, I had to pull out all the stops and wear my Rose Ribbon Embroidery.
Also at the last minute, I decided to make a few extra complementing items...
A matching RRE kumya JSK, and a bonnet.
What follows is more of a sew-along/journal rather than a tutorial or guide, mainly for my own memory's sake. But if you enjoy looking at my process (sometimes sloppy), I'm happy!
Also feel free to take a look at the more romantic process video I edited.
Part 1: Kumya JSK
Part 2: Bonnet
To make a matching kumya JSK, I first had to investigate the original dress a little! This I found actually very fascinating because I had never bothered to take a very careful look at the construction details of this JSK (it was, and still is always a precious item that I am afraid will get dusty or dirty if I look at it wrong...)
I actually even found a spot where it looks like the material was torn and someone roughly repaired it by hand (laugh). I have a feeling this was a factory mistake/fix (either from fabric manufacture or sewing) because it's hidden beneath some lace ruffle and I don't really think it's something that an owner would let happen, but who knows.
So here's a few details of RRE~
Many people don't know that RRE is made of velveteen! And further, there is sometimes a misconception that it came in a "cotton" and "velvet" version. As far as I know, there is only one version made out of cotton velveteen.
So the white can get dirty and attract dust super easily :')
The bodice has a panel of 3 ruffles + upper "hashigo" (ladder) lace part with ribbon. It is also boned (BABY's crap boning with sharp edges and no channels, meh...) but obviously I can skip that for kumya.
The skirt has a trapezoidal embroidered panel, the star of the show, surrounded by 3 tiers of ruffles that extend all the way around the back. The last "tier" is not gathered and has a smaller ruffle all around the skirt.
While thinking about how to construct something similar in kumya-scale, I found it fascinating that the under-material the ruffles are attached to are cotton! Makes sense to reduce bulk, plus you can't tell when the ruffles cover it.
The density of ruffle starts out quite concentrated, and then reduces as the bottom ruffle is reached. The cotton under-material also seems to have less material gathered than the main velveteen ruffle. This also makes sense to not only reduce material usage but also because having a huge amount of gather on the bottom tier can make the skirt look too heavy.
Knowing this, I fussed out some semi-arbitrary ruffle multipliers for each tier (and lining) in my notebook. Very important to keep tabs on how many fabric strips I need and their exact widths!
Also since everything is in kumya-scale the gathering is generally reduced by a lot. Kumya doesn't need much to have a very full skirt, and with such tiny tiers the effect of the gathering can easily look like overkill. The kumya elizabeth OP gathered lace/tiers very lightly:
As reference dimensions for kumya, I have these two kumya dresses which I used lightly (mostly the sugar bouquet one because it's a JSK). I also have the babydoll kumya, but as it was out of commission for a while (on my christmas tree!😅) I didn't use it for checks at all.
The sugar bouquet "bodice" is about 3cm long. I decided to extend it one more cm to 4cm to make it easier for me to calculate for the ruffles and also leave enough space so the ruffles would be visible and not potentially buried.
I use a cotton velvet fabric and a mixture of cluny and torchon lace I have on hand. This velvet has a noticeable twill weave to it and is thinner than the velvet BABY usually uses, but the thinness is perfect for this purpose. I was originally going to just use cotton sateen but remembered I had this!
You can't see the weave from afar so I tolerate it. I wouldn't have wanted to use polyester velvet/suede-like/minky, I think.
Since the material is still a velvet and does have a thickness compared to cotton, I decided to roughly hem any ruffle edges by hand with a simple once-turned whip stitch. it kind of seals the raw edge and hems it at the same time. Note that this is not a great idea for something that would be worn and washed a lot, but this piece in this specific case won't be.
In general, when it comes to mistakes with this piece I mostly ignore them because it's kumya-scale and not only will most people not notice, but as stated above it's also not a piece that will be worn and washed often so quality of construction isn't much of a concern.
Mentally deconstructing and calculating the construction of the ruffle part was a bit of a pain. My lace was wider that I needed so I had to roughly mark out where it should be sewn into the ruffle, not always with great success.
I'm also not great with working at small scale...much respect to doll clothesmakers.
The bodice of the sugar bouquet kumya JSK is made from a front trapezoidal panel with a strip of fabric attached to the sides that extends all the way around the back, and the skirt attached to that. So I cut some slightly angular side panels to attach to my rectangular/square-ish front ruffle panel.
(I threadmarked approximately where I wanted the seam to go because I don't trust myself to attach the side panel in the right area/dimension otherwise with such a wonky panel)
Simple straps made from strips of fabric. I make these slightly thicker than a regular kumya JSK as well because I feel like RRE has thicker straps too (well, the entire construction of the bodice is a bit different, but ignoring that...)
And a facing layer of ordinary cotton is sewn to the front panel.
For the section of lace at the top, I frankenstein together 2 types of lace that I trimmed to look more like the lace used on the original JSK. It seems the original JSK also has this lace sewn through the lining layer, so the stitching is visible from the inside.
I use the thinnest ribbon I can find--some silk ribbon in this case. It actually works really well because silk ribbon is very thin/flimsy and can be tied and threaded in nicely with relative ease.
By the way, if you aren't aware already, a yarn needle works very well for threading ribbon through lace.
Bodice portion finished. This took way longer than I was hoping, an entire night. Hopefully the results are worth it.
Next I fuss out the skirt. At this point I am working out the calculations and investigations already mentioned previously. I did make a few mistakes and had to re-cut a couple tiers!
I use a different lace from the bodice for the tiers because I thought the shape of this one was closer to what was originally used (it's actually the bilateral ladder lace used for the bodice, but instead of cutting off the lace edges and using the thread-through part, it's just cut in half)
After hemming the ruffle, I attach the lace to the velveteen ruffle with a single gathering stitch (too lazy to use 2, and the thick material makes it hard to gather anyway). The under cotton layer is gathered separately and sandwiched between the cotton layer of the previous tier.
Coming along. I think the lace length for these ruffles is a bit off/uneven/less than ideal, but oh well, can't be bothered to fix it...
After the third tier, a non-gathered velveteen tier is attached with gathered lace.
I also prepare the bottom ruffle, but that will be attached to the completed skirt.
Next, the most exciting but also potentially the most taxing part must be done--the embroidery!
I know that the top of the embroidered panel is basically the same width as the bodice ruffle (referencing the original dress), but the width of the bottom is a bit arbitrary (about 3x the width of the top of the trapezoid)
I mark out everything roughly with water soluble marker (the darker patches are where I messed up and used some water to erase, waiting for it to dry...)
The midlines of the panel as well as the 1/3 lines were marked because I 100% do not trust myself to make the embroidery symmetric without doing so. I'm a beginner and not nearly skilled enough in embroidery to freehand...
I carefully investigated the original embroidery and copied the locations of roses and leaves to my mini-panel. Once I have the general shape that I'm happy with, I start embroidering.
I didn't take too many progress photos of the embroidery, but I also don't think you need them. Because the scale was small, this took an entire evening/night which I think is not too long?
For the roses I use a combination of the "pinwheel" rose method and french knots (+ some additional plain stitches where I wanted more volume).
The nice thing about ribbon embroidery, I think, is that the ribbons add so much texture that even if it's a bit messy it looks very impressive anyways. Plus your mind will mentally interpret some random puffy ribbon lines as a flower anyways.
I use regular DMC 6-strand embroidery thread (split in half, so 3 strands used here) for the vines and leaves. Because I also suck at embroidery and have never embroidered a real project/learned real techniques I mostly kept the leaves simple and slightly abstract with 3 branchlike stitches. I think I currently can't fuss with making nice rounded miniature leaves without messing up every second stitch...
Finished.
I spray water to remove the marker marks and let dry.
Attach embroidered panel to ruffles. I should have double checked where the panel was aligning with the ruffles on each side since it's uneven, but whatever.
Gather bottom ruffle and attach to skirt.
I attach the bodice strip to the front bodice panel as well, and sew the straps down.
I basted the front of the bodice to the skirt by hand because I wanted to make sure they were aligned. Because I messed up sewing the ruffle tiers to the embroidered panel and they are somewhat misaligned, I tried to adjust where the top of the skirt was sewn to the bodice to compensate, it didn't work that well but eh, it's alright.
Gather the skirt and sew to the bodice portion. This was very fiddly and I had to redo some parts several times because the lace wasn't getting sewn down properly. It's still not great but I'll fix any egregious parts by hand.
The gathering is also pretty uneven, but I'm ignoring it...
Looks almost done but not yet!
There is a tiny bit more embroidery on the edges of the middle ruffle tier. I marked approximately where I wanted the roses to be and roughly embroidered them (without a hoop because it's too complicated to figure out alignment before construction, although embroidery is always easier with one).
I also add a back ribbon to simulate waist ties, a detail I notice on a few other BABY kumya JSKs. The waist ties on RRE have a slightly rounded/pointed shape to them, so I freehand this shape for the bow "tails" (because I'm getting tired and lazy, I didn't really measure although I did check that the width was approximately the same throughout). The backside of the waist tie is another layer of cotton, which reduces bulk when turning the shape inside out (the backside of the original JSK is also just lining material). I also folded a long strip over itself and basted it down, creating a loose tube shape to use for the bow part.
It's pretty hard to create defined folds in the bow with such thick fabric, but I tried my best...at least it's likely the back will rarely be seen.
I gave the dress a final allover spray with water to hopefully erase any remaining soluble marker. Also, some interior hand finishing needed to be done (mainly tacking down some unruly seams)
And finally, actually finished. The embroidery thankfully turned out decent enough to distract from any weird spots of construction and so on. It looks quite remarkably like the actual dress, so goal achieved I think!
Extra contents:
I make kumya little wrist cuffs because some of the kumya variations (such as babydoll kumya) come with them, and that's really cute.
BBD kumya seems to use a type of lace that's already elasticated, but I don't have that on hand so I just sew two pieces of the same lace used for the bodice ruffles together to make it bilateral and stitch on an additional elastic with a stretch stitch. And add on a little ribbon bow (I only have silk ribbon in this narrow width, but I think a ribbon with more body such as poly satin or cotton satin would work better)
And I also make two of those little applique ribbon thingies (you can buy them cheaply from craft stores and so on, but whatever) and stitch them temporarily to kumya's bows for an extra accent.
I'm lazy so I use the bloomers that came with the hawase kumya set underneath (I'm sure making a similar pair of bloomers wouldn't be too much work but I have no idea if these are patterned with some kind of shaping/rise and I don't want to deal with that)
This is actually yuefii's kumya that I am still hoarding for whatever reason and has its eye and mouth fur already trimmed.
And now Usakumya is ready to see the runway :)
Part 2 (bonnet making) is here.
Thank you for reading! If you ever decide to take up a similar project, I'd love to see it!
Loving this whole outfit!
