After a day of bill paying, paperwork, printing monographs, and errands, I made myself clear my cutting table and dive into getting the next project underway.
You may recall I had pulled out the leftover handwoven Splash fabric from the Design Challenge Project I worked on all last year for the HGA Tampa Bay Convergence fashion show. The Design Challenge has been on my mind in recent days, because the latest issue of SS&D is out and the next group of designers have been selected for the 2010 Convergence Albuquerque Challenge. The yarn is gorgeous, I’m a bit jealous, because these are my colors, I sadly had to contend with a Floridian palette. And the yarn for the latest challenge is bamboo and tencel, not the fat cotton knitting yarn, we were given. So maybe I’ll just have to order me up some of this great yarn (at $100.00 a pound!) and see what I can do with it, without the pressure of the challenge hanging over me. Then again, maybe I’ll open up my dye cabinet and see what lurks there…
Anyway, my best west coast weaving buddy Robyn Spady is one of the designers, she lives in Seattle and I’m going to visit her the beginning of June. I know she will have the same trouble I had keeping everything top secret! Congratulations Robyn! What a ride it’s gonna be… (Don’t worry Sally, you’re still my best east coast weaving buddy!)
Anyway, I digress…
I had made up the dress in a brocade
to make sure I liked the fit. I did some additional tweaking to the pattern pieces, and then laid out the two panels left from the original Challenge Fabric, side by side on the cutting table, so I could get a feel for how the colors would run from one panel to the other. There are two widths of cloth on the table, both with the same magenta running through the upper portion, which I’ll have banding the bustline. Though the pink was my least favorite part of the yarn and subsequent fabric, (which is why I had it leftover), it made 
sense to cut it out this way. I couldn’t have fit the pattern pieces any other way. As it was, I technically didn’t have enough for the center front and center back shoulders, and I didn’t even try to match them, but I was able to use my famous trick of butting selvedges together to achieve a wider width of fabric in that area. I try when designing fabric, to have the selvedge edges contain half a design motif, so when they are butted together, which happens more often than you would imagine, the pattern runs flawlessly across the garment.
I carefully cut out the pieces, cutting each pattern piece singly, using a single strand of embroidery floss for the tailor’s tacks, and then flipping the pattern pieces to get the second half. That way I could really control the grainlines and color.
When I was finished cutting out, I had the smallest pile of scraps, some of them should probably be tossed, but this little pile represents the remainder of a year’s worth of work, and a grand adventure, and I’m going to save this little pile, that started out as 10 yards of 36″ wide handwoven fabric! I know I can still use it for something else!
Now I really should go clean my dreadfully dirty house, make dinner, and read another 50 pages in my HTML manual…