The messy map of making this dress

I made this dress this afternoon. The lace began life as my living room curtain about twenty years ago. The curtain was a really early sewing project for me. It was one of a pair.

I was always fond of the fabric. I have been noticing lots of lace dresses made with brightly contrasting linings. OK so that was the genesis of the idea. I also have a huge fabric stash. Sometimes it feels good just to use some of it up.

I started by copying a basic dress.

The shape of the dress was this.

The lace had a finished selvedge edge. it would be silly to not use such a pretty hem as the dress hem. That finished hem meant that it made more sense to cut the dress with a straighter shape. more like this:

I cut the lace to the dress shape and a piece of hot pink Swiss dot cotton for the lining to the right shape. I sewed the lining to the lace.The starting dress was a knit. Everyone who knows anything about sewing knows that a dress with no stretch has to be cut bigger or with more ease than a knit dress with stretch. Even I know that.

Most people who sew by the rules would figure out some sort of a mathematical algorithm that would let them know exactly how much larger to cut a woven dress than it’s knit counterpart. Doing that sort of pencil and paper figuring hurts my head.

Usually I can just sort of guess how much bigger to cut a woven than a knit. My guess is pretty good about 75- 85% of the time. Even with the bad guesses, the whole process of dress making is quicker for me by eyeballing than sitting with a pencil and paper.

Today was one of the times when my guess was off. The dress fit nicely from my ribcage down. The top of the bodice was entirely too tight.

I thought that if I slashed the neckline open it would solve my problem.

I cut the neck and turned and hemmed it.

That almost worked. The dress was still too tight.

I have sometimes found that my scooping a neckline lower, either in front, or in back I can fix problems with fit. I couldn’t cut the front any lower so I cut the back neckline down a bit. I cut the back on the dotted line, and then did the appropriate hemming.

Here it is with the lowered back. The dress is still wearable with a bra. This bought slightly better fit, but the dress was still not wearable,

I then decided to add sort of reverse darts or godets to the side seams. ( for you non sewers who are still reading this sewing geeky post I added triangles) The arrow shows you where I added them.

This third attempt at a fix actually worked.

I can wear the dress and actually breathe.

For all of the insanity in the process of making this dress it shows none of the torment.

When I started this dress I thought I was making a casual summer dress. It has turned out to be much more of a fancy event sort of a dress. I even have an event for the dress to attend. We are attending a wedding reception in a couple of weeks. It’s outside of Boston. This dress has just the right sort of garden party vibe that is just right for a Boston afternoon wedding.

This dress feels like a child that survived trauma with grace

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog