Muslin "sketch" of wedding dress

As you may recall, I decided to do a muslin of the wedding dress pattern, to make sure it was flattering enough to use before designing fabric about it.  Here is the muslin:

I like it!  The lines are clean and the smooth sweep down from the neckline is slimming and adds length, which I need.  I like the slightly stand-up collar, and think it goes well overall.  Obviously the fit is not correct (it needs to be bigger, and the bustpoints lowered by about an inch) but the overall style is flattering.  (Yes, I did try it on myself first! but I couldn’t photograph it  on myself easily, so I used the dress form for the photo.)

My plan is to have the double-happiness ribbon fall down the front opening all the way from neck to hem, and to make the characters metallic gold against a white background.  I will have to figure out how to adapt the ribbon  around the curves of the neck, but if I can do that, I think it will be quite pretty.  The overall body of the garment will be either the eternity-knot pattern I designed or an advancing-twill heart pattern – haven’t decided yet.  Partly it depends on the scale I’m working with: if I’m working with 60/2 silk the number of threads per inch will be about 1.5x what it would be for 30/2 silk, making the pattern correspondingly smaller.  I want the hearts about 3/4″ to 1″ in size – big enough to be visible, but not to overwhelm.  I will probably make them in a relatively subtle pattern, so as not to distract from the rest of the dress, so either white against cream or white against a pale beige/ecru.  I may try glossy vs. matte weft as well.

My “bag” for CNCH, needless to say, is getting bigger and bigger.  Now I have the loom, the warping wheel, the laptop, ten or eleven samples of dyed wefts (pre-wound onto pirns to reduce bulk/make setup easier), six cones of potential warp yarn (30/2 silk/cashmere, 60/2 silk, 140/2 silk), and a warping board/bobbin winder in case other students need them.  Also eight ladies dancing, seven swans a-swimming, and a partridge in a pear tree.

The one thing I still need to add to my “bag” for the workshop is a few more variations on weaving drafts.  I’m thinking that a 7-end or 5-end satin or 4, 6-end broken twill might be best as the base fabric for the robe (the lower numbers for 30/2 silk and the higher ones for 60/2), but if I don’t want to be designing drafts in the hotel at night, I need to come prepped with a couple variations on the themes I’ve been developing.  So I think I will spend a couple days doing that.

Finally, a very interesting proposition…I had dinner with a mad-scientist friend last night and he mentioned that he had two small CNC milling machines he wasn’t using, and did I want to borrow one?  I said, YES!!! and so now I have to figure out what I could do with my very own milling machine.  (If you don’t know what a milling machine is, it’s a toy that can make virtually any three-dimensional object that you can design.  It can even take a .jpg and carve a photo in 3-D, with the darker parts of the photo being carved deeper than the lighter portions.  This has the potential to be a super cool toy.)  I was wondering what to do with it, when Mike said, “How about designing your own chocolate molds?”

Wow!  Now THAT is a cool idea.

So I will be looking into this when chocolate season rolls around again…!