My sister-in-law is planning her wedding for this Fall. She has super cute taste and a gift for shopping. If I were a stylish piece of clothing trying to hide she could hunt me down so fast. The only trouble with shopping is that sometimes what you want just isn't made yet. Bridesmaids dresses can be tricky to find in exact colors and within a certain price range.
So I'm making my own--without a pattern. And that's not because I'm awesome, it's because learning how to read a pattern has been more frustrating for me than simply researching individual sewing techniques and trying it out on my own. Plus doing it myself rather than copying another's pattern makes it feel more personal to me.
She sent me a silhouette of the dress pattern she has in mind, so here's my plan...
I start all my sewing designs with a sketch, usually on a scratch piece of paper or on my trusty iPad 2. Apps like Paper or SketchBookX are excellent choices on the free market. Napkins or junk mail envelopes work too.
"The sketch" includes three things:
1) Feature List. In the case of this dress, I want a boat neck, quarter-length sleeves, pockets, gussets under the sleeves, lapped zipper, bust darts, and a knee-length skirt complete with kick pleat and filler. Don't be fooled; I've never sewn a complete dress with any of these features put together. This is a dream list. As I start developing my pattern and time moves on it's highly likely some of these things will be sacrificed.
2) Order of Operations. Trying to outsmart my own system and skipping the triple-O is my greatest cause of unpicking seams in the wee hours of the morning because I just wanted to get that one blasted project done. Second-greatest cause is buttonholes, and there's almost recovering from that one. During planning I make a note of the order of operations as I go. I don't always know all the steps ahead of time but assembling a "this-goes-before-that" list builds my map to the finish line.
3) The Design (obviously). I sketch a line drawing of the basics, indicating where the features belong, estimated measurements if applicable, colors if they matter, and anything else that will help me get what I want.
Once I have the sketch, I move on to...
Step Two: Practice
I learned a valuable tip at the craft store today: if you're buying fabric for practice, look for stains. I can't believe I never thought of this before! I grabbed a bolt of bleached Muslin for some testing and when the woman at the counter unrolled the fabric from the bolt we discovered a grease stain. I paid $9 for $18-worth of Muslin and floated home on a cloud; that's powerful stuff.
My intention for the fabric is twofold:
1) Wash it. I don't care about the stain, I just want the texture and stretch to match the actual fabric I may or may not use for the final garment. I don't know the material at this point; one can only hope for knit when designing a wiggle dress. "Knit at a wedding?" you say? Time will tell.
2) Make a sample. This is where the gussets and lapped zipper--both features I've never sewn before--will be tested, tweaked and wrestled until I figure out what those crazy online tutorials are really trying to say.
More on "practicing" when I get there. Laundry first.
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When reading this you might be tricked into thinking things like, "She's got it all figured out!" Or, "That dress is going to be amazing!" Of course, lest we forget, this is my first full dress design and I've never tried half the things I want to include, so this will be fun! ("?")
Gussets and facings and zippers and pockets all promise late nights of measuring, unpicking, and stitching. (And maybe another word that rhymes with "stitching"...)
Needles may be broken. Bad words may fly. At least can all laugh about it when it's all over...
Do you have any tips that make your sewing experience easier? Feel free to share!
