Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Summer dress

Last spring I took a class to learn how to make custom made patterns. The final project was to sew anything we wanted for ourseleves.
Summer was already there and I was super busy with my 2 wedding dresses, I decided to go for a super simple cotton knit summer dress. And yes, that's kind of cheating since knitwear don't need to be custom fitted. But really, at that point, that's all I could reslove myself to do.
And here, I'm wearing it in the warmest day of summer (it was 40celsius, so above 100F!) to try a real Texas bbq before going tubing at the river:
NB: I'm not so fond of the hat, but it protect me against the sun quite well, and cover my face for the pictures I post here!

On the next picture, you can see how we do custom patterns: we create a copy of ourselves that can then be used as a dress form for draping.
To do it, we took our measurements, then picked the regular pattern size closest to our size, and finally draped it on ourselves (we were in teams) to make it fit perfectly, with no ease. This was quite long to perfectly achieve but we did it! And I was lucky to work with 2 really talented friends on that one. So once this is done, you sew it in a sturdier fabric (duck cloth) and fill it with bating so it fits on an existing dress form. And you're ready to use it as your new dress form!

I must say that it's quite weird to have a mini-me.
It was also quite long to do, but it was our 1st time. So it should become faster and faster as we get used to it.
And it's so useful!
Happy halloween!