The Year in Review, the Mythbusters Jacket, and How I Learnt that Failure is Always an Option

Hi everyone! 

This is a long one today so make sure you're sitting down with a cuppa for the ride. Scroll down for Sewlution news.

First of all I'd like to introduce you to the Mythbusters Jacket.

Why's it called the Mythbusters Jacket? The first reason is because I got on a serious Netflix kick for the show while making this. The second is because it hangs in my wardrobe unworn, reminding me that no matter your skill, expertise, resources or circumstance, abject failure is always an option. I have an unusable jacket. 

But that's okay!

It's Burda 12/2011 Herringbone Jacket 121.It's by far the most complicated thing I've made and admittedly way above my skill level. Someone out there can make this amazing, just not me. The jacket is made up of over 40 pieces.

Everything cut out

Front view, on the new whasijig

So, the great thing about failure is that you can never create a foolproof recipe for success but you can learn a lot from screwing up. I mean, Brain Pickings seems to talk about failure more than anything else. If you learn from when you mess up, it will help you learn to make something much better in the future.

So, what are the issues? (Being a process-nut, I'm going to ignore the possibility that my design choice was bad)

• I thought to try sew-in interfacing. It pulled, got in the way and did not offer support to the jacket.
• Burda's instructions are...well...Burda instructions. But the PDF instructions don't mention the front lining piece at all. You must trace and modify a copy of the bodice front (see photo below). 

How to get the front lining piece

Pattern pieces to trace and seam numbers

• There is also no instruction on the back lining piece, or if you need to trace a separate facing. I traced a  facing, but you can do what you like.

Lining

•  There is too much space at the front, and not enough at the back. OR the jacket falls backwards, pulling all seams off. To be frank, I think there's too much bulk at the nape of the neck.

Pulling jacket forward on the whasijig

But I'm proud of the jacket, (I even made shoulder pads!) and I wonder whether it's worth going back in the new year and fixing it. Would it be wearable afterwards? Probably not...but that's not what this is about anymore.

I want to know what I can take from this:

On the whasijig

 To replicate and rip off these:

1950s for Dior, design in V&A. Pattern magic, anyone?

Desigual AW 2013, would you pay £200 for this?

But with that, we move on to the year in review. I won't bore you with stats, but I guess you might like to know I surpassed 20 makes this year, which is pretty unbelievable!

But in January I signed up to The Jar hosted by Karen and made a Sewlution  for the year ahead. As the end of the year fast approaches, I must hold up my hands and admit defeat. Karen has been a harsh Mistress of The Jar and has not been above publicly calling out participants on their projects. Spurred by terror every time, I have diligently worked on my project and piped up about progress. But now I must confess the dress will not be done today. Again, failure is always an option.

The project has undergone so many name changes and deadlines. It's passed by Chic Expectations, Sewlutions, Matthew Williamson Dress, Advent Calendar dress...I have plugged more than 100 hours on the project on design, fitting, research and actual sewing. Early in 2013 there was a lot of work on fitting and pattern, then a 6 month review prompted a final decision on the design to carry forwards, then there was a lot of time spent on drawing and visualising the design on anything I could get my hands on.

Over the last two months I've been working on actually sewing the thing! If you follow me on Twitter, you've been witness to the Advent Calendar too, with many sessions late into the night. Here's what it looked like this morning:

Pins and all

Turns out 10m ribbon wasn't enough...

The rear needs some work

The dress is a push to finish, but the more work that goes in to it, the more it can't be rushed. I've come to appreciate the idea of a hundred-hour project and want to bring that through to 2014. Something that takes a whole year.

Why?

Thanks to this dress I've learnt to grade patterns, fit muslins, sew difficult points and understand non-standard patterns, work with difficult fabrics and embellishments, create and work from a design sketch, source and trial materials, practice beyond sewing (drawing skills, anyone?), drape, hand-sew...and heck I've still got work to go!

If you can learn this much from one long-term project, it feeds in to every shorter project you do. A year in review is not about what has and hasn't been made or how often it's been worn, but how are you a different sewist (or maker) from the one you were 12 months ago. There is light far at the end of the Sewlution Tunnel. It's crawling closer, but the Mistress of the Jar will need to know this is going to be done on my time, not the Jar's.

Hope you'll join me for the rest of the journey,

K

Sewing Advent calendar roundup!

Hi guys! 

A quick roundup on what's happened with the Sewlution/Advent Calendar/MW dress over the past couple of weeks. It's it's been a roller coaster already and I can't believe there's only 10 days left to get this done! It's crazy!

Today was the first time I've been able to visualise the dress units colour distributions and properly plan how to do the appliqué bits and embellishments. Here's how it's looking, let's see if we can pull this off...

Of course no project is without it's problems, I'm hoping most of the issues were taken care of in the planning stages but we'll have to see. This apparition showed up during some pressing pages, and I'm beginning to get worried...

Wish me luck for the final ten days!

Chic Expectations - Eep! We hit six months!

The problem with most people who sew is that we go for fabric like other people go for shoes, DVDs, Apple products, sexual partners or, heaven forbid, actual items of clothing. And then, when a big project comes along, we find ourselves looking at our stash piles, throw up our hands and say "but I've got nothing to sew with!". Which is where my current great problem lies, and why nothing in the stash...or in the many shops I've been to for advice have been able so demonstrate they're a good match for what I have in mind.

Just as a reminder, here's the line drawing:

I've gone through several people, suggestions and ideas for fabric, all of which are probably acceptable, but not quite right. It's all fine, but the whole point of ripping off reinterpreting this dress is to be needlessly ostentatious. It should be recklessly extravagant and almost definitely make you and those around you question why you're putting so many hours in to it. It should categorically not look like anything else out there. Take it to extremes and be tastelessly aggressive. If this dress could talk, it would sound like Brian Blessed.

I have pondered this question ever since I saw the pattern. What on earth should it look like?

Joel & Sons has just opened its online store. It would have been one place to find some exquisite print as inspiration. It was one thing to gawk at their fabrics without knowing the price. Knowing the money at stake is a very very different thing.

But now I finally have an idea. It's an irrational and wild idea. It's broadly solid colours. It's going to take time and an awful lot of effort. It's going to be a steep learning curve, but I can't get it out of my head, and it's definitely the right thing to do. Think peacocks. Think poppies. Think art nouveau. Think gobos.

I've been using all the inspiration I can find to draw these ideas together. There are a few things that seemed to be important to capturing the spirit of the dress/design: bright colours, diagonal lines, hand finishing/intricate embellishment. These are points I really want to keep.

The silhouette of this dress is fairly classic, but it's the seam lines and the straight lines in the print that makes it look modern. Digital. Jagged. Edhy. That's something I want to change.

Let's take it back in time and make it a lot more organic, soften all of the lines, tweak the colours. Let's add texture not through the layered print, but through appliqué, reverse appliqué and beading. Let's base the curves on my art nouveau calendar, the extravagant houses in Brussels and a dining chair from the Vienna Museum of Applied Art.

These are the colours we're looking at

The one concern about this design is that the seam lines might get lost under the embellishment. Is there any point making this dress if those details are hidden? Or am I just creatively making use of them in the background?

What do you think?  Now to find the fabric. I'm off for a look around Goldhawk Road. A good long look.

Until next time.

Chic Expectations - Muslin the Second*

I've spent a fair amount of time in the past couple of weeks around some amazingly creative people and it's been a bit infectious. Last weekend I sat down to  make steady planned progress on two projects I've been working on for a while. Instead I drafted a new pattern and blitzed up two tops over the course of a day and a half. One's not quite done and neither have been photographed yet but they'll surface in the near future.

One of the things I managed to catch last week was the end of A Bigger Splash at the Tate Modern. I think the objective of the exhibition was to illustrate how artists came to place value on the process of creation rather than just the value of the final product. It was a pretty enlightening exhibit and I've decided to shamelessly use it as a springboard to talk a bit about the progress on the MW dress. That way, if it does ends up accidentally looking like a piece by Kazuo Shiraga then the value in the process of this garment will still remain.

So what progress has been made? I had drafted a whole post at the end of December about a second muslin I made incorporating the changes from the first one I pinned out. But I don't even have any pictures of it, it went so badly. Nothing at all matched up, it strained and bagged, the neckline was wrong and a couple of the seams were so fudged I was going to wrap the dress up into a Thorntons gift box.

The picture below doesn't look like there's a big difference between the pieces, but the modifications were based on accidentally sewing it in the wrong way up, then applying modifications upside-down.

If only you had asked in January where the waistline was on this piece...

So I totally fell out of love with the project. It ground to a massive halt because I also couldn't decide what it should actually look like. I still don't know. But for some reason it's got to get done. It was a New Year [res]Sewlution, considering some of the other pledges in that jar, making one measly dress should be easy!

I've done the only sensible thing and started all over again: retraced the pattern and graded everything down to a 34 and a 32 just in case. I've prepared a muslin "properly" according to Linda Maynard and spent time pinning and adjusting the new one.

I've also tried to be more methodical with the flat pattern adjustments. On the first pattern I knew it was a basic bodice where the panel seams incorporated the darts, and I still wasn't sensible in how the pattern got altered.This time I've tried to reduce chances of getting confused, so I taped pieces back together, did the modification, and then separated them again.

So here's the partially altered new muslin. The opening is pinned in my right side rather than the centre back (where the zip will be), and having a pinned kimono sleeves is a right PITA (armpit), so excuse the odd arm sticking out.

The horizontal pleat above the bust has completely disappeared, and I don't think I need to adjust the waist position. I've still got to take a horizontal wedge out of the upper back and a vertical one out of the centre back. Looking at this, I could stand to put a little bit back in to the side seam, but we'll leave it at that for now.

The skirt still hasn't been properly adjusted, but it definitely needs more room. The side seam is tilting forwards. I'm not sure why, but all the extra room they've placed on the pattern is in line with about halfway up my forearm, so I've had to pinch that out and will have to add a lot of room at the level even with my wrist.

I still have no clue how to tackle the lining, facings or design but it'll get there. Slowly.

See you next time,

K

*No one else gets the Bleak Expectations references, do they?