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…
So I put on my dress, even though not all of the handwork was finished, and there were still tailor’s tacks everywhere, and modeled it for the group. Many of them were following the blog, and were thrilled to be the first ones to see the dress. Everyone ohhhh’d and ahhhhh’d until I turned around. I could tell something was wrong. One of the difficulties of sewing a garment for yourself is not being able to really see behind you. I had Sally, one of the members, take a photo of me in the dress, and when I checked the images to see if I was happy with them, I was rather shocked. I called over another member Margriet, may I say an exceptional weaver and sewer, and asked if my butt looked like the beachball that it did in the photo? She admitted that it did, and we discussed the problem, which was basically the angle of the grainlines as they moved in on the bias line towards the bodice. I looked like I stuck a gargantuan pear into the back of the dress. So we talked about the fix, and I felt much better, ready to take the dress apart in the back, and rework the skirt under the bodice. I need to straighten out the skirt grainlines in the center back, and take small darts around to the side.
Well I made the decision, and went with the pattern from the muslin. I played around with the layout for quite awhile today, I admit, I was stalling for time, not wanting to make that first cut. Once I cut, there was no turning back. Since there was no repeat over the length of the yardage, the center front seam would be critical and I would need to match colorways as best I could. I was reasonably happy with the way the darks carried through the two halves and I’m now working out the bodice part, which is cut in two halves, left and right, there is no shoulder seam and the pieces eventually become bias. What appears to be the shoulder seams on the photo above, are really the side seams on the bias. I transferred all the markings with tailor’s tacks.
I attended the opening of the gallery show in NYC tonight, of the Textile Study Group of NY’s member’s show, Economies of Scale. It was a beautiful show, very crowed, and I was thrilled to have a couple of my pieces in it. Details of the show and images of the pieces I had in the show are in the Upcoming events box on the right, it is up through January 31. No work in the show could be larger than 6 inches in any dimension, and it was amazing to see how the 48 pieces in the show in various textile techniques accommodated the constricting parameters. Bigger isn’t always necessarily better. Even in my own work, I was pleasantly surprised that the pieces I did, scaled down from larger works, were as effective as they were in that scale. The feedback was very positive.