Oh, Bitter Irony

I guess I can't bitch too much about my stays not fitting: apparently I have actually dropped a few pounds since I draped them. I haven't been really trying, just sort of vaguely making a point not to overeat. Does it make that much of a difference?

It must, because it is period week so I am bloating, and a dress that makes it obvious where I am in my usual 5-pound shift is on the low end of that today. While I'm pre-Phantom Menace bloating, ergo my new low end must be lower than it was. So...win?

If only it felt more like a victory....

Although I really don't think I've lost enough to account for the missing 2 inch gap that I had planned in, so some of this is still on my patterning fail.

Fuck

Stays are too big. I could lace them completely together. They are allowed to be an inch or two apart, so I was planning to do that in case I get all "I want to be hot for my wedding" inspired to lose some weight. But they already touch, and really it felt like without sufficient compression to perform their purpose anyway. So, I have to find a way to lose like 2-3 inchess of them.

Shit.

Fuck.

Goddamnit.

Motherfucker.

Cockgoblin.

Asscrack.

Balls.

Stays Making Part 1

I've been working on my stays lately. I blew up the pattern I got from my bible website and ran a test version in muslin. It didn't really fit my figure--I have a high waist and a short torso, so this didn't really surprise me. So then I went totally ghetto-modiste and self-draped by taping some muslin to my shoulders and drawing the lines where they needed to go. Yeah. Ghetto-fabulous! I worked a pattern off the draped lines and the general outline of the website pattern, and it was eh...more or less right. With a few adjustments based on the draped pattern I did a second pattern, and in muslin it seemed to fit.

There was nothing to do but try it in the real stuff, including the boning--the lovely thing about corsets is that you really can't tell if it's going to fit correctly until you "mock it up" in the real fabric with the boning. If it works, great, all you have to do is finish off the ends of the tunnels and add the lining and/or top fabric (in my case both) and trim. If it doesn't, you just wasted...however long it took you to cut out the pattern, baste it together, and sew 38 boning channels. In this case, about two 6- or 8-hour days and probably another football game or so (which isn't really 3 hours of work, even if it is 3 hours of clock time :).

Here's where I am: boning channels are sewn. Next step is to put the bones in, awl out some temporary (as in, I'm not sewing them, just creating them in the fabric) lacing holes, and wear the thing for a bit. That isn't going to happen before this weekend, as it's going to be an undertaking of at least a few hours. And I have to go buy an awl.

So here's what I've learned:

• Corsetieres were probably total stoners. Seriously. Sewing 74 (76 minus the 2 I did by hand) straight lines in a row got tedious on my machine...can't imagine doing it by hand.
• I can totally see why most of them were men. Coutil is fucking dense. It made my hand ache for two days to have done even that much work with it directly.
• I overcame my fear of sewing a crooked line on my machine after it took me 45 minutes to sew one tunnel (two parallel lines) by hand and dulled the needle I was using to near uselessness. I have so many better parts of this project to spend time on than taking 15 minutes (being very optimistic about aggregate speed after mastering the full learning curve) per line x 2 lines per channel x 38 channels...yeah, that's like 19 hours. Fuck. That.
• The seam on a pair of stays only extends down to the waistline. I know this seems like kind of simple and self-evident, but nowhere on the pattern or in the instructions did she make that clear. So my first test in muslin I made the mistake of sewing below the waist line. It took looking at one of her pictures against my test to understand what I'd done wrong. Seriously, where is my Sewing for Retards?! (Why do I feel like I'm writing it right now?)
• Proper tensioning is a necessity on a machine. Both upper and lower. I had to re-sew the first line of the first channel I sewed with my Brother like 6 times before I realized that it wasn't the upper tension or the stitch length that was wrong, but the fact that my lower thread hadn't caught its tensioner when I put in the new bobbin. Der...
• My boning fans do not look like hers. I hope they work anyway. I followed the process as she described it, but with the proportions my body necessitated on the patterns, the bones just didn't lay themselves out the same way.
• Buying plastic boning to cut to length was a good idea in terms of ease of cutting. Let's hope it doesn't make my stays so flimsy in those areas that I have to waste another $10 shipping to buy more boning. At least this time I'll (1) have all the lengths exact so I can just order what I need and (2) enough of the plastic left over that if I have to make another pair of stays ever I can cut mock-up lengths with that and order the steel when I'm sure the pattern is correct....

So there it is. Expect a picture fest of the various stages once I get the thing tried on so I can include that (as long as it's doing the job, of course...if it isn't, expect a post of just one single word).

Nervous!

About to cut my first pieces of real fabric!

(Base layers for my stays, if you're curious...and if you're curious, yes, there is enough that I can fuck up and re-do completely.)

Wish me luck!

Football and Sewing

I had a moment of grand excitement last night when I realized that college football season is about to start. I am an avid football fan (college pretty much exclusively—I guess in the end I’m that much of a girl that I can’t do it more than one day a week!), by which I mean I tend to spend Saturdays watching anywhere between College Game Day and 1 ½ games (if both my alma matter and LSU are playing at the same time) to…well, an all-day affair that encompasses three full games and pieces of others. Yeah. Like I said, avid.

I will admit that sometimes, some weeks and even some seasons, I’m less into it all. But it occurred to me last night that spending all day Saturday in front of the TV watching football means I can also be spending all day Saturday sewing. I won’t have to feel like I’m missing time reading or that I should be doing housework or any number of other pursuits, with respect either to the watching of the greatest game or the sewing projects. If I do both, I’m multi-tasking, and that absolutely trumps any singular activity I could engage in instead.

So I’ll be watching all the games this season. And sewing while I do it. And if that’s not a Project Runway editorial combination of “hard” and “soft”/”masculine” and “feminine” to a hilarious degree, situationally speaking….

Now if I can just control my drinking-with-football habit, I've got it made!

Embroidery Part 1

Embroidery is both a surprise and not a surprise. It's not harder than I thought it would be, but it does take longer. Like I kind of expected to be about a third or halfway done with my pattern by the end of our drive home on Sunday, but I had, mm...maybe a sixth of it done? Maybe? Slow going! Now part of that may, I am willing to entertain the possibility that it might, have been because of the bumps and grinds of the road. But. Even taking that into account, not quite as fast as I expected.

But the stitching isn't hard, and I think my execution is as good as I could hope for. My design is (and this is another surprise) very obviously mine. I adapted some pictures of embroidery out of my Kyoto history of fashion tome, only because my domicile of guest abode had no internet--unexpected event--so I couldn't access any of the patterns I had found online. What I adapted looks so much like the way I always painted flowers in high school art it's uncanny. I guess I have a solid vision of the world, artisitically speaking, and it's still the same ten years later. I don't know whether to be pleased or dismayed. At least my drawing style translates decently well into basic embroidery shapes....

I'll post pictures after I'm done of the pattern, the pattern transferred onto the fabric, and the finished version. I don't want to jinx anything in the meantime, though. So no pictures for now.

Embroidery Conundrum

I know I haven't gotten around to telling you all about making my chemise. I am like 80% I'm remaking it and that thoroughly demotivated me to talk about the trial version. I am about to embark on my embroidery journey. I am fairly confident this will come easily to me. I have always done well with abstract graphic designs in art classes and such, and I know the basic stitches and principles already--blew through a book on basic stitches in about 20 minutes because it was all "yes, I know how to do that."

Honestly, the bigger questions I had were the most simple of all:

how to thread the needle--by which I mean, does the embroidery thread run doubled or just with a tail at the top but leaving only one thread in the fabric (one with a tail up front)

do I knot the ends (mixed messages on this so I'm going with the Victorian site that said yes)

do I unwind my double-helix thread (if I want it thinner, which I do, then yes, I can)

So once I got those questions answered, it was time to decide what, exactly, I want to embroider. First embroidery project is the red dupioni silk that will cover my stays, because I can't find any black lace that does not look cheap and plastic to sew on as per my original plan. I have to embroider the fabric before I can cut it, and I am going on a road trip this weekend and expect at least one of the 6-hour drives to be in daylight and thus prime time to work by hand.

I was looking at styles of embroidery today, and I found two styles that I like, and I don't know which one to use.

Blackwork Embroidery

Con - It is not period appropriate (it was popular in Elizabethan times but had fallen out of use by the 18th century)

Pro - It would mimic the lace-covered look I wanted originally

Con - It works better on gridded fabric, which mine is not

Pro - It is essentially outlining patterns rather than "drawing" with thread and filling them in, which is harder to keep looking nice (case in point 99% of the embroidery how-to books on the market)

Con - Its pattern would be exceedingly difficult to transfer by hand (and since my fabric is not on a grid it would have to be traced onto the fabric)

Pro - It is a graphic design style of repetition and interlocking that I have worked with and enjoyed working with on paper

Satin Stitch Embroidery (AKA regular filled embroidery)

Con - It would not give me the lace effect I wanted originally

Pro - It is period appropriate

Con - It will require an original freeform design

Pro - It is the kind of embroidery I'll have to use on his waistcoat so this would be good practice

Pro - It would be equally easy on non-gridded fabric as it would be on gridded

Pro - The pattern would be easier to transfer onto the fabric than a blackwork interlocking repetition pattern

Sigh. I think I just talked myself into the free-form satin-stitch. It's for the best, really it is...and I would be disappointed, I think, whichever way I chose. One path cuts off the other, simple as that, and I want both right now.

So. Now I just need to find a pattern that is appropriately dramatic, suited to the space and shape it will go, and work-able in a monochromatic design (black silk on red silk only). Maybe my artist mum can help me with that this weekend....

Here's some thoughts of things I like but why this exact pattern wouldn't work:

Middle section only - still too wide

The part on the coat - has no centerpiece

Would not work in black only but isn't that utter gorgeousness?