The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: An Evening Dress For Elisheba

As I mentioned in my burn test post, I've been working on a dress for Elisheba.  Here it is:

My design sketch:

This dress felt like a lot of firsts: first evening dress, first time doing a little net crinoline, first time working extensively with straps, first time working with fabric chosen entirely by someone else, first time making a toile.  Writing it up, I realize that the only things I had never done before were making a toile, box pleats for the net crinoline, and the narrow (comparatively) straps.     

The dress is a princess-line, unwaisted dress with a contrasting center front panel, shoulder straps, decorative back lacing, invisible zipper in the back waist, and a mini-train.  The fabric is polyester (probably) satin with gold metallic overlay on mostly pale sky blue background with dark blue flowers.  The front panel is polyester (probably) brocade in dark blue with gold and bronze dots. 

I started with the pattern for McCall's 6382 and another dress of Elisheba's (from ebay) that has the same basic construction as the design sketch.

I actually made a thigh-length toile (usually I jump in with scissors and repent later) out of an old white cotton curtain and did a fitting, tweaking the front bust, adding darts to the side back panels, and noting to take out almost half of each center back panel (even size 8, which the McCalls was cut to when I inherited it, is too big for a closely fitted dress on Elisheba.)  Then I had to turn the toile back into flat panels, which took some thought.  (Projection of 3-dimensional objects back to a 2-dimensional surface.  Not exactly easy mathematics.)  I marked and then cut away the extra fabric in front, marked darts with marker on the side back but did not cut, smoothed out the swoop for the side pieces, and ripped out seams where they needed no adjusting, marking each piece with permanent marker for where there was seam allowance and where not.

Then I got out the scissors, measuring tape, model dress, and fabric, and spent two days keeping Scaramouche happy.  He loves it when I spend a day sitting on the floor.  He also surprisingly un-cat-like: he will stay off the fabric and cuddle up against me instead. 

The dress has a complete thigh-length underdress in inoffensive pale blue polyester satin that is sewn to the main fabric at the top.

I started by assembling overdress and underdress separately, sewing all the vertical seams except the center back on both.  Actually I messed up and sewed most of the center back seam on the underdress, and then realized I'd sewn the center back seam on the wrong side to have the underdress face shiny side in when assembled, so I had to rip that seam out.

Looking back, I should have done another fitting of the underdress at this point, because I knew I had extra fabric in the center back, but not exactly how much, and I should have checked the side back fit also.

But instead I did a little shirt-tail hem on each side of all 4 center back pieces, deciding I'd simply fold the fabric to fit when I put in the zipper and not worry about finishing around the zipper bottom.  The "don't check fit" was a poor decision, but I did really like this method of handling raw edges around the zipper: I didn't have any!  With shred-prone satins, this is a necessity.  I will use Fraycheck fluid if I don't have a better solution, but I always consider it cheating.   

Speaking of shred-y satin, I used french seams everywhere except at the hems and at the top lining and outer fabric join.  French seams have become my method of choice for all fabrics except stretch fabrics: they leave no raw edges, they are very neat and tidy, and when I screw up and have to rip out seams, it's easier on both me and the fabric to take out two straight seams rather than a zig-zag stitch. 

Then I put the netting on the underdress:

First box pleats!  Actually I didn't think enough about which side was going to end up facing which way, so they ended up as reverse box pleats.  They also took almost twice as much length as I originally measured.  Box pleats are 3 to 1, right?  Three times the final length?  The only thing I can think is that my pleats ended up wider than planned, since I was pleating half by eye as the net went under the machine foot instead of trying to iron measured pleats and then stitch.

Net is one of the things Scaramouche will try to eat.  I had to yell at him to cease and desist gnawing on the net while I was cutting this part.  

Then I attached underdress and overdress at the top, right sides together and then flip, yes?  Well, no.  Because I had tried to cut the straps as one piece with the dress, for smooth lines, and then discovered that there exists a minimum diameter below which you cannot turn a narrow tube of inside-out fabric right-sides out again.  So I uttered some blasphemies of Russell's teapot and cut the straps off, recut longer straps (because I lost the seam allowances when I cut off the originals) as sewn-shut double fold bias tape type construction, only cut on the grain for strength instead of on the bias, sewed the straps back in, and contemplated the join between inner and outer layers.  (Is there a word for strips with no raw edges made by folding a strip in half, then folding each half into the center again and stitching the open edge shut?  Because I do this a lot, and I don't know what to call it other than bias tape type construction, even though most of the time I'm not cutting on the bias to make these.)

In most places my seam allowance was wide enough to turn the raw edges in and stitch the seam allowances together, but I had a couple of trouble spots where the underdress had come out with a dangerously narrow seam allowance.  I recently learned about hemming with bias tape (or lace, or ribbon, so pretty!) and considered that, but then got fussed and anxious as to whether the ridge from bias tape would show through the upper layer (it is very lightweight, drapey stuff), and feared if I needed to take off bias tape it would rip up the raw edges too much, and wrung my hands a bit, and ended up just soaking the raw edges with Fraycheck.  So that is my major cheat for this dress.

If I'd been less fussed about making the dress look perfect for Elisheba, I would have looked at the strap joins, and realized that if I can't see the ends of the straps under the outer layer, bias tape would be fine.  Maybe I'll go back and finish the inner/outer join properly with bias tape or ribbon later.

Then I put in the zipper (invisible.  Love those things.  I have my mother's invisible zipper foot on semi-permanent loan.)  Then I did another fitting.  Somehow the lower back was still too loose, so I took in darts on top of the original darts (because the zipper was already in, and not only is un-picking a zipper extremely annoying, I was afraid the main fabric was not strong enough to stand up to having the zipper taken out and redone.  So extra darts it was.)  Quick and effective, but not the tidiest solution: 

Then I had another fitting to even up the bottom outer edge and mark the hem.  I hemmed it with a simple shirttail hem.  Thinking back, I should probably have faced the train with very lightweight cotton, to protect the fashion fabric.  But I can add a facing later if Elisheba really wants this dress to last a long time.

Last I made the back lacing.  I had originally thought it could be ornamental and just sew it to the main straps, but once I started sewing I realized that as tightly fitting as the dress needs to be, the lacing has to be functional, even though it's non-loadbearing, in order to get in and out of the dress.  The lacing is made from sewn-shut double-fold bias tape construction, but cut any which way on my longer scraps rather than being truly bias-cut.  It runs through buttonholes.  The buttonholes are a mess, because I was impatient and didn't do a size trial on a scrap.

The butterfly on the shoulder is made from tracing a butterfly printout from the internet on thin paperboard (cardboard without a corrugated layer), gluing fabric to that with fabric glue, and then hot-gluing a hair clip to the back.

I had so much fun working on this.  I would have done a better job on construction had I taken the time to think and visualize the construction thoroughly before jumping in with scissors and stitching, but in the end the dress fits and looks lovely on the wearer, which is the point of an evening dress!