We’ve been having some pretty nice weather in Seattle lately, so I’ve been doing more gardening than sewing lately.
My dog Charlie, is usually my garden helper. He likes to sit out in the garden with me while I work, or just roll on his back in the grass. He’s nine now and starting to get lumpy, as Labs tend to do. So we just had to have one of his bumps removed. Since Charlie is recovering and can’t really go outside much right now, I have a good excuse to stay inside and catch up on some sewing.
Now Charlie is my sewing helper!
My second project for the Colette Patterns Palette Challenge, that I have been working on, is the Crepe dress.
This is great advice. Thank you Sarai! I think I will take my time!
The fabric I picked out for this dress is a bit see through. Luckily, I found a series of blog posts on Gertie’s New Blog for Better Sewing, from a sew-along of this dress she did a couple of years ago. It’s a pretty thorough sew-along, with instructions for every step of making this dress, from fitting the muslin, to underlining it, to facings and so on.
The post on underlining is here. I can already tell that this is going to be very time consuming and I hate hand sewing. I think it took me an hour just to hand baste one piece and I have nine pieces to sew.
I think this could be a really cool dress, as I really like the fabric and the fact that it is wrap dress. And the underlining has helped add opacity, so I think underlining it is worth doing.
I also spent quite a bit of time fitting the muslin as well. I even made two muslins this time (of just the bodice), to make sure I had it right. I used Gertie’s tips on bust darts from her Crepe Sew-Along. I love her reshaped curved dart technique, it totally worked.
So this dress make take me awhile to finish. At the rate I am going, I think I have at least 7 more hours of hand basting ahead of me, but that’s okay. I’ll just take a deep breath, try not to think about my sore needle poked fingers, and remember Sarai’s advice!
