Tien Chiu

You are here: Home / Archives for dress form

by

Prepping for CNCH

I’ve been working hard at getting the dress forms ready for CNCH.  This involves quite a bit of tedious grunge work.  First you have to have someone wrap you in plaster bandage to create the mold.  Then you have to remove the mold, let it dry, and then sew it back together and seal it.  Then you put in mold release compound so the plaster doesn’t stick as much, and pour the foam.  (Which is kind of magical, by the way: you mix up this cream-colored liquid, pour what looks like a tiny bit into the mold, and a few moments later, the foam magically rises to 10x (or more!) the original volume.  It’s like watching a stop-action film of bread rising!)

After you pour the foam, you have to remove the plaster mold.  This is more complicated than it looks, since some of the plaster will stick to the form.  Removing this involves a chisel, a rasp, and lots of patience.  (Lots of patience.)  Once the mold is removed, you have to cut a wooden base for it, mount the base, and make the stand.  After mounting the form to a stand, you then have to rasp/sand it down until it reaches the correct dimensions.  (Because you breathe during the making of the mold, it’s going to be slightly bigger than it should be.)  Finally, you have to sew the cover.

All in all, a highly time-consuming process, but the dress deserves nothing less.

Currently I am about 2/3 of the way through the process for the 2nd form.  The stand is complete, most of the plaster is removed (I’ve got about another hour’s work to go, best guess), and most of what remains is rasping it down until the coat hangs on it properly.  That could easily be another several hours of  “fitting”.  Alas, I can’t work on it until the sun comes up, so until then, I’m hanging out and blogging.  🙂

A few other interesting notes:

  • First, I have confirmation from someone who is willing to wind skeins of silk for dye samples for me.  This is tremendously exciting, as I’ve said before, and I’m starting to look through various manufacturers’ dye colors to see which new primaries I want to try.
  • I took the dress in for appraisal on Sunday, and should get the results back today.  The appraiser (former textiles curator for the DeYoung Museum) said the workmanship was excellent, and the ensemble was exquisite (!).  Now I just need to get the final number so I can get insurance.  I’m expecting it to come in around $30K, but the real value (of course) is “priceless”.
  • I’m probably going to donate both dress and coat to a museum sometime after the wedding and all the weaving exhibits are over.  (I’m not planning on having kids and I refuse to let it go to a garage sale when I die!)  Melissa (the appraiser) suggested either the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles or the Oakland Museum, and I’ll contact them in a couple of months, after all the weaving and fiber exhibits are done.

by

Plastered

May I present to you the result of much work this afternoon?

plaster mold for dress form
plaster mold for my dress forms

I wish I had photos of the intermediate stages, but here’s what’s been happening the past few days:

  1. Mike wraps me in wet plaster bandage.
  2. Before it sets completely, cut up center front and center back.  Remove cast.
  3. Let cast dry for a couple of days.
  4. Using a tapestry needle and button/upholstery thread, sew the two halves of the cast together.
  5. “Tape” together the sewn edges using more plaster bandage, first perpendicular to and then parallel to the cuts.
  6. Seal up the armholes with more plaster bandage.
  7. Through the neck and bottom openings, smear the entire inside cavity with paste wax (as a mold release agent).
  8. Seal up the neck with more plaster bandage

And voila! the sculpture you see above.

Tomorrow I’ll start pouring the foam.  This is 3-pound foam, so one cubic foot weighs 3 pounds.  I have a two-gallon kit of foam, which should be plenty for two dress forms.  I probably won’t finish pouring foam until Saturday, though – you have to do the stuff in layers – and after that, I’ll remove it from the plaster mold (hopefully not damaging it too much in the process), sand/rasp down the dress form to the correct measurements, and mount it on the stand.  There are actually more steps, but I’m omitting them for the sake of brevity…I expect this project to take up a good chunk of the weekend.

Wedding-dress-wise, I’ve sewn together and finished all the seams of the second lining.  Tomorrow morning and/or Saturday, I’m going to sew on the pearls, and then on Sunday I’m going off to Sharon’s again, so we can work on dress and coat together.

by

Plaster mummy

Today I had Mike transform me into a plaster mummy, covering me with wet, rapidly-hardening plaster bandages until I was in a full-body cast from neck to mid-thigh.

No, I don’t have a plaster fetish.  (Really.)  Instead, we were preparing to cast a dress form using the instructions in the My Twin Dressform manual.  First you make a plaster cast of your torso and let it dry.  Then you fill the plaster cast with plastic resin foam, and presto! a Fantastic Plastic Person.

Since I was complaining recently that there needed to be three of me, I think I’m going to cast two Fantastic Plastic Tiens from the mold Mike and I just made.  The first one can go to work, the second can work on the dress, and I’ll just kick back and weave.  🙂

No, seriously.  I will need to display both coat and dress, so I’m making two dress forms.  For display purposes, I’m going to cover them in black stretch velvet for maximum visual impact.  After that, when they become “working” forms, I’ll cover them in something less dramatic, like a rib knit.

Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful day.  I finished sewing down the back lace, and sewed down the pearls around the neck edge of the bodice.  I had exactly as many pearls as were needed to complete the neck edge – good thing I didn’t lose any more of them!  I will use the new pearls on the body of the sleeves, and on the back of the dress.  I don’t think the difference will be noticeable there.

I also finished hemming both sleeves, and started clipping the too-tight stitches out of the hem.  Tomorrow morning I’ll go at it in earnest, to see what can be saved.  Redoing one row of stitches will cost me about three hours, which is about 2/3 of a weekday’s work – annoying, but not nearly as disastrous as I was thinking earlier.  So hopefully I can get the hem fixed tomorrow.  That will free me to work on the second lining the rest of the week.

I am also starting to design the wedding invitations.  I had wanted to set them up with woven double-happiness symbols, but I’m running out of time for that (somehow time seems to be getting away from me lately!).  The dress probably won’t be done until the beginning of April, precisely when  the invitations should really go out.  I could probably warp up the loom at lightspeed once the dress is done, and bang out the invitations, but I’m not sure I feel like working under any more time pressure!  Once the dress is done, I plan to kick back and relax for at least a week.  (OK, well, maybe just a couple of days.  I’m not very good at doing nothing!)

At any rate, the rapid sweep of time means I need to start thinking about designing the invitations.  I figure I can do that in my spare time, when I’m sick of working on the dress.