A Tale of Two Dresses…

…And a pair of pants.

Those who have been following my epistles for a long time know that I had a stash of leftover handwoven fabrics that would smother a horse, stashed in my attic since my craft fair days in the 1980’s.  I’ve done a reasonably good job making much of that leftover stash disappear, at one point I bagged up pound groupings of similar values and sold them through my website and at the local guild show and sale.  I’ve either sold off or remade much of the old work that remained of my craft fair days.

Back in late 2014 I uncovered this dress, which I wrote about in my blog from that period.  I liked the fabric in the dress, it was one of the few that I actually had fond memories of.  The color combination (there were about two dozen different yarns in this mixed warp) was unusual, and I think I remember using a frightfully expensive dyed boucle silk from Cheryl Kollander as the basis for the colorway.  The colors have probably faded a bit, but if I had to hold onto one thought from that period of weaving it was this one.

The dress was a 1980’s nothing.  Folded in half yardage with a bit of shoulder shaping, hole in the neck, and stitching up the sides.  The seams were French, too bulky for handwoven, which of course I know now.  But back in the 1980’s I hadn’t started to teach yet, and so never had the benefit of my classes to set me straight.  The reason why I’m so good at sewing Handwoven clothing is precisely that period of time, where I wove 30-90 yards of fabric a week, cut it up, made a bunch of garments and sold them in craft fairs from 1979-1989.  I made a lot of garments.

The fabric itself was way too loosely sett.  Most yarns were in the 1500 yards per pound range and I sett the yarns at 12 epi.  It threaded and wove quickly, but the resulting fabric was pure sleeze.

I had the dress sitting on my dress form for probably a year and a half.  I kept staring at it and thinking that I should either wear it, dump it, cut it into scrap and sell it off, or make something else with it.  I found a pair of  wool crepe pants in a beautiful plum color in the back of one of my closets.  I don’t think I ever wore the pants, and I’m not sure how they got to my closet, but they had no side seams and an elastic waist, and would yield two long uncut lengths of fabric once I took the pants apart.

While cruising through the patterns on Sewingpatterns.com, noticing they had a sale on their downloads, I found a lovely dress with small pieces, color blocking if you will, NeueMode 25010 and downloaded the pattern.  There are a ton of pages to tape together, and the directions are so brief and vague you’d want to laugh, but the fit is lovely and I don’t need no stinkin’ directions anyway.

So I looked at this dress on my dressform every time I entered the studio, and I’m there a lot now with all my looms full and lots of stuff to draw me in.  I traced off the pattern back in the fall, but never got around to doing a test garment and figuring out if it would even work.  So I dove in a couple days ago, tried a test garment, did some tweaking, with the help of my daughter, it is so hard to do this by yourself.  Which is why people take my classes over and over.  Sure helps to have a fitting buddy.

Anyway, long story short, I made the dress.  Just a bit more handwork.  Really lovely.  I’m so pleased.  I fused a knit tricot underlining onto the back of the handwoven panels for stability, and the fabric is performing perfectly.  The purple is a bit graphic, but the combination works and though this is not by any stretch of the imagination the most beautiful fabric I’ve ever woven, it means something to me, and I’m glad I was able to preserve it and will be thrilled to wear something more contemporary this summer, instead of the sleezy 80’s dress I resurrected from the attic.  I think secretly my fear was that if I wore the dress in its original state, someone would ask if I had made it and then I’d be pretty embarrassed.  There is a time in every artists’ life that old work, really old work should be laid to rest…

Stay tuned…