[All images are clickable.]
When I created this blog it was meant to be a showcase of my writing because I was giving very serious thought to pursuing a career in online freelance. The idea fizzled out and a little over a year ago my passion for sewing kicked in with fervour.
Perhaps in the future I’ll write a post about my love of sewing, how it came to be and how its grown over time.
Today’s post is about a newly planned project; my very own Oscar de la Renta dress. Or rather a remake of one courtesy of Don over at Weekend Designer.
At first glance the dress only involves doing one thing I haven’t done before – drafting a pattern from scratch. Except I never really do things the easy way and upon closer inspection I discovered putting the dress together is going to be more work then initially expected.
The dress in question looks like this:
And the instructions from Weekend Designer are here.
I sense drafting up the bodice might be a tad headache inducing since this is the first time I’ve worked with drafting equations. Maths were never a strong suit for me. However, I have a calculator, I have determination and I have a husband that’s brilliant at maths and will help if I get stuck.
Loving the centre back zipper I am not, so once I have the pattern drafted properly I will try moving it to the side. Also, I look dreadful in orange so I’m not making it in the colour shown. Nor am I making it in silk or one lone colour. After all, what’s the point of sewing my own if I don’t customise?
At the start of spring I bought about ten metres of clearance fabric to make one of my retro Vogue patterns. The pattern was cut, the fabric wasn’t so I have ten lovely metres of fabric washed, pressed, waiting to be made into something fabulous. And since nothing can ever be a solid colour in my wardrobe, I went through my sari’s to figure out which one went best with the base fabric and came up with the following combination:
The green of the sari is more accurately represented in the second picture.
The bodice will be crafted from the pallu of the sari:
Hopefully there is enough of the near solid gold to make the entire bodice, if not, I’ll cut and sew the pallu so both parts create stripes. The shoulder straps of the gown will be made from the border and I will also be sewing the border around the bottom of the lowest tier. The rest of the sari I will be cutting into wide strips and sewing onto the fabric being gathered into tiers so when the fabric is gathered the sari forms stripes running down the length of the skirt.
About those gathered tiers. I don’t think they were gathered simply with a ruffling/gathering foot. On the site I snagged the images from there was a zoom of where the ruffle is attached to the skirt.
From what I can gather (see what I did there?), a channel is sewn to the fabric, the channel is then sewn with a stitch line through the middle to form two channels. Cord is then run through each channel. The cord would provide greater control over how the fabric gathers and would allow more play because it is stronger than thread. Also, with two channels of cord, when the ruffle is sewn to the skirt one would follow the centre stitch line therefore making it so none of the carefully placed gathers flatten. It really is ingenious and I truly wish I had come across this method before – it would have saved a lot of broken thread and curse words.
Since the dress is sleeveless and I want to be able to wear it all year, I’ll be constructing a semi-accurate Venetian camica following the directions supplied by The Realm of Venus to wear beneath it. To make the camica I’ll be using silk from a wedding train I purchased a number of years ago at a second hand shop in Kingston, Ontario.
I’m removing the lace and it’s taking much longer than I expected. I’ve ripped out a lot of stitches, many that required patience and a steady hand, but none like the ones affixing the lace to this silk. Holy cow.
That’s the plan. All I have to do now is execute it.
