Long time to chatty chat. As you all know very well at this point due to the wedding I've been MIA for a loooooooong time. Not that I haven't been doing projects, taking tons of photos, and doing the general crafty craft business. In fact the last year has been a crafty overdrive. I started a new costume making business (more on this later), I may be about to start apprenticing under a corsetiere (super exciting, fingers crossed), and I handcrafted every inch of my wedding and wedding reception. So as a result I have a year of backlogged posts just waiting to be free!
So for the first backlogged post I decided to go back to a project I started many many moons ago. Namely the January Dress, a dress I was patterning after this fabulous vintage piece of amazo-sauce.
When we last left off I had only just completed the muslin. So onto the next step!
Step one was to underline the bodice pieces. I used Tasia's fantastic underline tutorial over at Sewaholic for this one.
I stitched a 1/4 inch in and trimmed the underlining to fit 1/8 of an inch inside the outer fabric. This worked fantastically and lays nice and flat.
In addition my desired color result was created. A white eyelet fabric with just the tiniest touch of ivory peeking through. Just a little bit of a vintage colored touch while at the same time allowing the white fabric to modernize the dress enough to make it wearable for all sorts of functions.
After underlining the step 2 was to dart the shoulders on the front and rear of the bodice. The darts help to build the breast cups on the front and add a nice little bit of detail to the back (pictured above).
I apologize for the mess in the above photo. I hadn't trimmed the threads yet. I decided to do the old pull the bobbin thread through and tie some knots trick. Holds just as well as locking the stitches in with the machine and makes for a much cleaner line on your darts.
See? Nice and clean. After the darts were ironed down in the direction facing the neckline it was time to add some facing. The pattern I used did not include facing so I had to draft it. Pretty easy to do. Just trace about an inch or so out from your shoulder line and neck line.
I decided not to underline the facing. I didn't really see a need to do so and it seemed to me that it was add a little too much thickness. As for the edges of the facing? I just pinked the edge since this fabric doesn't seem to unravel too badly.
On the first side of the facing I combined the shoulder and neck facing into one piece. You can do this for almost every sleeveless bodice, but unfortunately this was one of the few where it didn't work out. The eyelet fabric was just a little too thick and made the sleeve poof up a little too much. No problem though. A very quick fix. I simply sniped down the center and the results were one thousand times better.
Stay tuned for more January dress tomorrow!
Much love,
BG
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