Project One Update Pt.6

Wow, what a difference a few grainlines make.  I totally re-did the back of the dress, paralleling the zipper and the selvedge.  I took additional darts, at the side seams, and adding a second one on either side of the center back.

One of the real problems of the original dress, was the zipper.  I was afraid that the pleated fabric of the bodice was too thick to have an invisible zipper, yet I didn’t want any machine sewing to be visible, so a centered zipper, even hand-picked, wouldn’t have worked.  And I was right.  So I changed to a shorter invisible zipper for the skirt part of the back, and I’m in the process of engineering a hook and eye system for the bodice, so the pleating will just meet.  Right now, for the photo, there are a couple of pins strategically placed!

So for now I have to clean up the tacks, do lots and lots of handsewing.  The v-neckline is actually on the selvedge, so I could just easily tack it down without worrying about a facing and added bulk.  It is great to take advantage of selvedges on handwoven fabric whenever possible.

Meanwhile, I spent the better part of the day doing a Digital Classroom Photoshop CS4 tutorial.  A number of years ago, I went back to school to learn the basics of digital photography, my 18 year old son was just a toddler.  I have a degree in fine arts from the 1970’s, with a concentration in textiles and photography, but that was black and white film photography, digital hadn’t come into existence yet.  When I went to the community college for the class, they handed us one of the Classroom in a Book series for Photoshop, and it was wonderful to sit and go through the book, doing the exercises, step by step, at my own pace.  There were approximately the same number of weeks in the semester as there were chapters.

Many years later, and many upgrades later, my well worn and obsolete Photoshop Classroom in a Book manual got replaced.  So I’m about half through the new book, and then will start on the Digital Classroom Manual for Dreamweaver for web development.  I have used the old Microsoft Front Page for my website work, it is so old it is not supported any longer by Microsoft, and my website looks like it was created in Front Page.  So now I have the industry standard, and a huge learning curve in front of me.  But I love to learn new things, and so each day I do another chapter and plow my way through.  I volunteered to take over the Frances Irwin Handweavers Guild website, and promised to rework it when I learn this new software.  And I did something I may really regret later on, I agreed to give a seminar in web development for the Michigan Handweavers Conference in August, as a companion to my popular seminar in Photographing your Work, and as of this writing, I haven’t begun to develop it…  Talk about putting the cart before the horse….  Stay tuned…