Jusqu'ici tout va bien...jusqu'ici tout va bien...jusqu'ici tout va bien...

Did you hear the one about the man who jumped off the top of a block of flats?

Of course you've heard it.

The MW dress is over. Having worked on the dress for a year and a half, literally hundreds of hours, it is finally complete.

It isn't perfect. Every step of designing, fit and construction was new to me or pushed my existing knowledge to its limits.  Every stage that got ticked off I'd say "so far so good" and move on. Perhaps this wasn't the most forgiving dress for its imperfections. If one seam is slightly off in the pattern, it will show. If the fabric is damaged, it will show. If the fit is off, it will show. If the construction is sloppy, it will show. And the whole of its imperfections will appear greater than the sum of their parts. Truly.

Perhaps now that it's done it feels a bit like I've hit the pavement.

I have a philosphy that whatever you make tends to subconsiously reflect your state of mind at the time. This dress has gone from whimsical and ambitious to exhausting and disheartening. The fact it took two years to complete means that every step is the best of what I could do at the time. Not now.

I don't know what the dress was ever meant for. It was beautiful and needed to be made. It was a cocktail, birthday, wedding guest etc dress. I think I said at one point that I wanted to wear it on my 25th birthday, and again on my 50th. That obviously didn't happen.

In its final unfinished hours it found its purpose as a work dress.

Now let me explain.

I have somehow fallen into a profession where we organise and host fancy-dancy events for fancy-dancy bigwigs. Just as gents need a suit for this kind of thing, I need an Event Dress. The old one had served me well, but at the beginning of 2014 I looked at it for what it was: a stinking, overworked, RTW polyester dress from 2006. It had served its time. Moreover I felt like a fraud talking to fancy-dancy bigwigs in this dress and a faded, ill-fitting, shoddy Zara suit jacket. It was cheap. It was awkward.

So I threw it out.

And the MW dress has taken over. People sometimes wax poetic about the power of clothing. I recognise it's not a perfect dress. I recognise people probably don't consciously care what other people wear. But in a room full of fancy-dancy bigwigs, I'm bringing something to the table that's totally unique. I am proud of this dress. You don't need to know I made it. It doesn't matter to me whether you know or not. It's not perfect, but what were you expecting? You need to know that this dress is a promise: look at it now and if you decide to buckle up for the long haul, you're in for something spectacular.

So I've jumped and hit the pavement. I've gotten back up and walked away. Now it's time to dust off my (shop-bought) jeans and move on to the next project...

K

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

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 First

This is my first muslin for the Matthew Williamson Burdastyle Dress. It's great practice for making the pockets and seams match up in the front, and for sorting out the orientation of the pieces. For example, I already tripped up with the back pieces, forgetting that because of its deep V, the back piece has a very short CB line. As a result, I made have added some seam allowances in the wrong places.

The whole fitting and pinning process was a lot of trail and error and took about 3 hours.

There were a number of size and fit issues that had to be tackled, namely it's far too big. The back is also far too long and baggy. You can roughly see on these photos where I drew in the corrections.

The bodice is too long so I pinned the dress waist seam to my actual waistline and tucked out a horizontal line across my midriff. I've pinned out the side seams to make the size generally smaller ad I've also taken a few inches out of the centre back to make it shorter/accommodate a swayback. There are still a few drag lines in the skirt, but it may be due to the zip being pinned and distorted. I'm going to wait until the next muslin before fixing this.

There was a lot of extra room in the top of the dress around my shoulders; I know that the neckline is supposed to follow the line of the collarbones, and that it will hit the flat part of my shoulders so I taped this in place and then pinned out the excess width in the centre front. There was still a lot of room around the bust and upper bust so I spent some time experimenting with darts to make the dress more fitted. You can see in the photo above there are darts going up towards my shoulders. I decided to take them out and just put them in the usual place for darts.

Granted, I'm still not sure what the exact flat pattern adjustment is for these darts. Do they go up to the armhole like a normal bust adjustment, or do I incorporate them into the gap for the panels...which are darts after all? Or does the pattern shape end up the same regardless of whichever method is used?

So the only major issue that remains is the shoulder blades. I can't reach there without distorting the dress so will be applying a bit of guesswork over the next few days. I reckon it's just a wedge of about 1.5 inches towards the CB tapering to nothing at the armscye...around the blue lines here:

So there we go! Any comments on the muslin? Next up: make another one, and choosing some fabric!

Chic Expectations - Girl Meets Dress Pattern

Sometimes when I look at my finished garments, I wonder whether it's worth showing off the logic and deliberation that goes in to producing something that looks simple from the outside. Surely that justifies making those choices deliberately, rather than simply picking stuff up and throwing it under the foot of a machine? Lately I've been looking for a project that will banish these thoughts, force me to be analytical and exercise some sort of restraint or maturity in what I make. I reckon I've found the right pattern: it's a pretty dress.

 
So here is is: Burdastyle 9/12 #134

Image source

 It's a close fitting sheath dress with panels instead of darts, a waist seam, wide neckline and deep V in the back. It is completely lined. It's much more structured and complex than the fit/flare dresses I normally would be tempted to make. This project will force me to me to be slow, deliberate, and considered in how I work. I'm planning to document the process here, to help illustrate and justify some decisions and to ultimately stop me from saying "ah sod it, that'll do".

You may have noticed that it's basically directly lifted from the designer's AW12 collection. I want to keep this in mind and basically rip it off as well as possible. One of the reasons I chose to learn to sew was to learn how to rip off much more expensive garments, and seeing the RRP of the actual dress has spurred me to want to make a good job of it.

So here's what needs to be done:

- Fitting: This mainly applies to the bodice, as the skirt only has one real fitting point to be wary of. The pattern's smallest size is an EU36 which is likely to be too big. I'll have to reduce the overall size while keeping panels and design aspects in proportion. I know straight away there will be issues in the shoulders, upper chest and back. So that'll be fun.

- Applying pattern alterations: I'm still getting used to taking 3D alterations and applying them to the flat pattern. Applying the alterations will also mean making at least 2 muslins (mockups in cheap fabric) and a lot of paper patterns.

- Fabric choices: The dress is loud, the fabric needs to be loud. It needs to be a light drapey fabric with some sort of stripe/linear pattern, and a lot of colour. Some of my research on the original dress shows the fabric to have a very high sheen, and it almost looks like a silky oilcloth. This is something I am not prepared to copy, as I don't know enough about sourcing fabrics to even approximate something like that.

And then at some point there will be the stitching of the actual thing.

Stay tuned for the first fitting post!


And if you live in London, it turns out the designer is selling his sample wares in Mayfair at the end of the week...yaknow, if you've got that kind of money to drop on prototypes.