The main reason sewing has been my weakest craft has been for lack of patience. 16 seasons of Project Runway gave me the illusion that the dressmaking process was as follows:
- Gather scraps of fabric / garbage / spare zippers
- Stare at dress form
- Snap fingers with idea
- Make it work! (in under 24 hours)
Every time I just zip something through a sewing machine it has ended up an unwearable mess, or a bunch of pattern pieces that haven’t fit, or the worst case scenario: pattern pieces that I am afraid to cut into because how do you know which line to follow?
This time around, I did enough research to know that I should make at least one toile, a practice version of the dress in muslin to make sure the dress both looks good and fits. I ended up making three versions of practice dresses. For the first, I copied the pattern exactly, with a lot of buffer room around the seams. I drew all over this version and sharpied the names of the pattern pieces on.
Princess seams felt impossible at the beginning of this process and the first go round I was barely able to stitch them by hand. It just never feels like you can get the convex curve on one piece to line up exactly with the concave piece on the side front. For the second one, I cut many little notches in the princess seams to help them lay flat.
I installed a zipper inside out so that the fabric could hold itself up during pinning. Alison came to my rescue to help pin the parts my arm couldn’t reach.
I spent a lot of time hand sewing to teach myself a lesson about patience, or rather to set a slow-ish pace so that I wouldn’t rush right in and mess it up. I think this paid off because I was able to hand sew first some of the seams with the final fabric that otherwise would have gone weird under the machine pedal.
It was so much fun to try on the second toile that I had some paralysis about moving on to the real thing.
Something Sewn Something Blue 