My Muse went on vacation for a couple of days, which I spent working through pattern drafting exercises.  I took them to Sharon on Sunday (along with the jacket muslin), and to my delight, I discovered that I had done the exercises correctly.  So now that I have dart manipulation down, I’ll be moving into style lines (princess and panel designs), and from there to adding fullness/ease.

Sharon also made a few adjustments to the jacket muslin – not many, as it fit pretty well “out of the box”.  The unadjusted pattern length (meant to be mid-thigh or above-knee) is actually mid-calf on me, but we  agreed that lengthening it to a coat would be just fine.  We may shorten it to below-knee once we see it in the actual fabric, but that should be pretty easy.

And I am almost done with my 1-week exile from weaving!  I am totally excited, though I will probably take a few more days to let the hip rest up before actually weaving.  So I will start threading the loom on Wednesday or Thursday so I can weave (gently, gently) over the weekend.

And now that my Muse is back to work, here are the fabrics for square #1 of the fabric manipulation sampler:

For some reason I can’t get the colors to come out right, either with flash or with the (yellow) lamp, but they are just beautiful “in person”.  When I finish, I’ll take a photo in natural light, and hopefully that will come out better.

This sampler square will be about gathers and ruffles.  The purple chiffon in the top left will be gathered into strips running around the borders of the square.  The gold duppioni will be gathered into a quarter-circle in top left, and tacked down (to create brain-like crenelations) in a quarter-circle at bottom.  The orange scrunch-dyed fabric will become a wavy ruffle going through the square.

This is all fairly ambitious considering I haven’t tried any of these techniques before, and I cheerfully expect to screw up at least one of the components.  That’s OK; it’s a sample, not a finished piece, and I expect to learn a lot from it.

I thought about the design a bit more yesterday and decided I didn’t like it at all.  So I played around some more and came up with this design:

This also has serious design flaws (most notably, the square frame around the design creates a very rigid feel), but it will allow me to play with curved lines, straight lines, and (quarter) circles, so it will do for now.  I’ve decided that for this piece my primary interest is sampling, so I’m willing to sacrifice quality of design for the ability to try the things I want to try.  In an ideal world, I could work it out so everything came out perfectly, but this is not an ideal world, and I’m impatient, so I’m moving ahead with this.

This all looks terribly dry and monochromatic in the pattern, but I think it will look a lot better once sewn.  To whet your appetite, here’s a photo of the fabrics I intend to use for this sampler:

Alas, the flash washed out the colors, but they are deep,  rich, and should be just gorgeous against the black silk noil (which will be the background).  I can hardly wait to sew this up!

And, lest you think I have given up on the garment challenge, I’m going up to see Sharon later today.  She’ll be helping me fit the tunic pattern, and I’m hoping she’ll also review and offer corrections on my pattern drafting exercises.  I’ve finished the first chapter, which is all about dart manipulation, and am moving into the second, which is on working with style lines.  That seems to be about working with the princess seam, at least so far.  I’m seriously enjoying the exercises, which require thought and understanding, not just repetition.

I’ve been busy at work designing square #1.  Here is one tentative design:

It is a bit too busy, but I kind of like it.  I may add a circle of plain muslin around the edges of the brain-like inner design, to give the eye a place to rest amidst all the ruffling.

I thought I’d share a couple of the things that didn’t work, and why I didn’t like them:

This is the outer ruffle on its own.  By itself, it’s too plain and the circle in the center is too large (IMO) to make an interesting design on its own.  You could set up several circles – which is what was done in the original – but on the whole it needs something to add variety.

This doesn’t work.  I had hoped that adding a square grid would break up the unity of the circles a little bit, and add a little spice, but the contrast is too strong, jarring in fact.

Next I tried a more circular pattern, this one a twelve-sided polygon which approximates a circle:

This doesn’t work either.  The contrast is not as jarring as the squares, but the triangles still clash with the circles-and-radiating-spokes theme in the ruffle.

So then I thought of putting a piece that would riff with the radiating spokes – take them to the next level, as it were:

This I liked much better.  The radiating spokes pick up the radiating lines of the ruffle, but are more disciplined in appearance, adding variety without disturbing the unity of the circle motif.

However, I felt that there still wasn’t enough variety in the piece.  All those radiating circles related just a bit too much.

So I added the “brains”:

This broke up the radial symmetry just enough to give the design a focal point.

Anyway, I’m not wedded to this particular design yet, I think it needs more work.  I may get rid of the ruffle, or else make it a double ruffle, like this:

…and generally I’m not super-satisfied with it.  I want to play with the design some more.

However, since I actually want to start handling fabric sometime in the very near future (my hands are twitching!), I think I will start making at least some of the components of the design.  I may totally redesign it on the fly, once I’ve created a ruffle and a yo-yo and some other stuff.

I’ve pretty much given up on making the quilt a unified design.  I don’t want to have to plan that far in advance – this is a side project (at least for now) and not my main focus.  So I may just wind up with a bunch of sample squares that don’t “go together”.  That would be fine, too.

I do want to play with color, too – so I will be dyeing at least some of the fabric.  I’ve decided to use silk, as I have a lot of small pieces of white silk to use up, and because I can dye it with acid dyes.  Dyeability with acid dyes is handy because it means I can dye pieces very quickly – a few seconds in the microwave – and then iron them dry, which is useful if you are an instant gratification bunny like me.  I don’t want to have to wait 24 hours to try out a new color!  With acid dyes, I can have it almost instantly.

The other advantage of using silk is that I have everything from stiff bridal satin to soft organza in my stash (the legacy of haunting Exotic Silks’ remnant bins for awhile).  So I can try a lot of different fabric textures without having to buy anything new!