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?

Say Yes to the Dress

There's not much on the telly on lazy Sunday mornings, so I found myself watching Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta this morning while I checked my email and took care of some things with my internet business concerns.

Wow. That show made me so glad we're doing things the way we are--I can totally see why a friend who recently got married told me that she just went to the bridal salon alone, without telling any of the females in her family she was going, and found the dress that she wanted. I couldn't handle having to arrange an expedition with like 5 other people so that no one in the close family or friend circuit got offended at being excluded, and then finding what I thought was my dress only to have a mother or grandmother shoot it down. Bad enough if they were just there for company or for advice, but even worse if the parents are actually paying for the wedding and therefore, perhaps, entitled to help with the planning of it.

To hell with that. We're paying for it ourselves, which is of course part of why it's so ghetto chic and down-scaled. Also my parents are just not that concerned about such things. I think they're also, well, not particularly taken with any romantic notions about our day. Like, when my brother got married, it was after a normal courtship time period of 2 or 2 1/2 years, and he's the older sibling, and so on. Enter me, after an 8-year relationship and living quite separated from my extended family--they're not even invited to the wedding separated--and in the meantime my brother's got two kids on the ground, so my parents just aren't feeling too concerned about my actual wedding. Which is a boon. I don't have to have anyone telling me what to do or even offering opposition to what he and I decide. Basically, we're doing exactly what we want--at least insofar as we can manage to arrange it with the options we have to choose from--and the people we invite can come, and enjoy, or not.

And the limited guest list also means that if every one of our close friends wants to make a long speech, no extraneous guests will be rolling their eyes and complaining later about how long the toasts were, because everyone who will be there are those who care the most for us and would be pleased at such toasts. Or simply too inebriated to care, and that works just as well. Also, given that our entire wedding budget is less than what most of these women are allowing for their dress alone, we won't be putting ourselves into debt (either literally or just in the figurative sense of owing parents emotional favors for paying for a huge gala) to get married. Considering that we thought really hard about just going back to Venice and speaking vows in an echoing empty church with no one to witness it but the stones, we're pretty happy with this as a compromise.

So basically what I'm saying is, all the wedding shows on TLC just reinforce to me how non-traditionally I think about such things at this point in my life!

Almost Met My Deadline!

I received the second shipment of boning--the 1/2 inch wide steels--in the mail yesterday (Monday), which means I didn't quite make my deadline for finishing my chemise. But I'm close! All I have left to do is hem the back neckline and the two sleeves. Basically, one movie/the last two episodes of Band of Brothers' worth of my time. Then, naturally, take pictures and post. Sneak preview: It kind of sucks and I may be re-doing it after all is said and done, but for now it's almost finish and worst case scenario I use this one anyway since no one will actually see it.

Stay tuned!

Maybe Brilliantly Played, Costume Designer

So I just bought a sketch pad that is almost big enough for designing on...will only have to tape 2 pieces together instead of 4 like I'd have had to with typing paper. Sigh. Why does no one sell butcher paper by the yard instead of 50 yard rolls or nothing?!

Anyway, I was looking at my images of Stanze's bodice, and I had a moment of synthesis that might make her dress even more brilliantly made than its look alone is. Observe the seaming:

See how the bodice is constructed of nothing but strips a few inches wide, except for the front panel? This could be about the tailoring so that it will fit all her contours perfectly, but....


First, I have learned in my research that fabric consumption was VERY conservative. You can see from a few extant old patterns how almost every scrap of fabric was used--very unlike today, which will tell you to buy an extra 2 yards in order to cut everything along the bias or something. Tailors in the old days did not give two shits about bias cuts or grain cuts or anything like that; they cared about fitting as many parts of their pattern onto that rectangle of fabric as they possibly could. Second, Stanze and Mozart were middle-class, rather than aristocratic or rich enough to be the equivalent, so I'm wondering if Stanze's bodice isn't constructed that way to imply it was made in part with scraps, as a money-saving device?

I will never know why the decision was made, of course, since there is not a book about the costuming of Amadeus, but if her dress was meant to suggest something about their financial situation and Stanze's thriftiness in taking a dress made with what might not have seemed like enough fabric...then that's brilliant.