Craft Rage

As I suspected, it took me longer to baste the lace to the fabric than it took me to put the dress together.  I basted over the weekend, and finished assembly this morning. Here it is, in all it's glory. Okay, glory is a really big exaggeration. But here it is, at any rate;

The cream lace over the blue fabric is NOT the look I'm going for - my actual dress fabric (unless I change my mind) is this silvery green, tone-on-tone bridal satin and lace;

The lace and fabric I used on this test dress were truly the crappiest fabrics I've worked with so far - both are from the $1.47 bin at Wal-Mart, and I'm pretty sure green fabric is some kind of super-cheap lining stuff that frays if you give it a hard glance.

Just as a reminder, here's the redrafted bodice, in the original pink version.  The last time I showed this, it was held together with binder clips, and not actually attached to the skirt of the dress in any way.  I've now basted everything together, just to double-check the fit, and doing so has taken care of some of the gaping that was happening - apparently, binder clips are simply not up to the task of carrying "the girls" around.

It's a huge improvement from the monoboob, but it's really... Well, it sort of magnifies everything with it's shininess. Plus - does that look right to you?  For some reason, that crossover in the front looks strange to me, like there's too much fabric.  But then when I look at similar pictures on the internet, I see the same effect.  Maybe I'm just being hypercritical.  Anyway, here's a close-up of the new dress, with the lace overlay.

I'm still torn between leaving the bodice in just the satin - the silver green satin isn't nearly as shiny, so it won't look so dramatic, but I really love scalloped edges of the lace on this version.

One thing that troubles me, though, is that if I use the scalloped edges on the bodice, it does funny things to the orientation of the flowers; is this something only people who sew will notice, or is it just glaringly obvious to all and sundry? Oh yes, and that reminds me - I am aware of the fact that I have had a small accident with the way I've positioned the flowers over my bust.  Don't worry, it's just the test dress. In the real dress, this won't happen. Probably.

The wider skirt is a HUGE plus - the original pink dress had a more close-fitting skirt, with no flow to it, which was pretty unflattering. I was going to use the original pattern, but really, it was just cut on the fold, and was basically a rectangle, so the top seam that runs under the bust was just a straight seam. You can really see that from the pattern on the picture;

I ended up not using the pattern at all for the skirt - I cut the back skirt as a very rough rectangle, with a narrower top than bottom, and I originally cut the front skirt as a rectangle, then folded it in half and took a big, curved scoop out of the top so that I'd get that sort of bias-cut, flowy look.  That also eliminated the need for the darts at the front, although the back still needs them.

In reality, I only used one piece of the original pattern to make this dress - the single piece of the back bodice - the rest is so drastically different that if I compare the pattern pieces to the pieces of the dress, they're nowhere near a match. And since neither of the sewn versions actually require me to use a zipper to put the dress on and take it off, I'll likely just cut the back bodice of the third version out on the fold, instead of cutting two separate pieces and joining them with a zipper.

I still have to cut about 1/4" off the armhole at the back of the arm - the fabric kind of binds up there, and I'll likely draft a couple of tiny darts at the neck, because there's a little bit of extra fabric across the top of the piece, but all in all, I think I'm on the right track.

Labels: wedding dress