wedding dress – Page 33

April 16, 2009 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

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:

A quick muslin sketch of the wedding-dress pattern

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 B. 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…!

April 14, 2009 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Dyed yarns for sampling

I have not been entirely idle the last day or two; I’ve been dyeing yarn samples for the wedding-dress project. Here are some of them:

Yarn for sampling the wedding-dress patterns

The ones to the left of the metallic gold are 60/2 and 70/2 silk; the ones to the right of the metallic gold are approximately the size of 30/2 silk, in a variety of yarns including alpaca, muga silk, wool, and a 75/25 silk/cashmere blend. I dyed them in various colors without paying much attention to the exact ratios; most are a mix of Sabraset mustard and Sabraset chestnut brown, sometimes with a little turquoise thrown in.

I had a surprisingly difficult time getting pale colors, as you can tell from the strong browns and strong golds in the mix. I kept cutting and cutting the amount of dye and finally got it right in the two skeins on the end (still drying, thus not wound onto pirns yet). It will be really interesting to see how this works!

I have thought some more about yarn choices for the wedding dress and have decided that the warp will either be 60/2 silk (15,000 ypp) or a 75% silk, 25% cashmere blend at about 6500 yards per pound. Both are strong enough for warp, are white, and (more importantly) I have enough of each in my stash to do all the yardage for a wedding dress (14 yards for the overrobe, another 12 for the dress). I do tend to buy in large quantities but it is pretty rare for me to have 26 yards’ worth of anything on hand!

I am still debating whether to sew the dress underneath out of handwoven or commercial fabric. As there is no immediate urgency to this project (note that B. and I are not engaged, therefore there is no wedding scheduled, thus a leisurely course is just fine) I suppose that question can wait for awhile. I think it would be fun to weave it in an advancing twill heart shape, modeled loosely after the hearts in the Twill Thrills: The Best of Weaver’s book.

Coat-wise, I have done the back interfacing and taped the neckline, and the next step will be sewing it all together. I have reluctantly abandoned the idea of doing it using Claire Shaeffer’s methods in Couture Sewing, primarily because I don’t have enough experience with coat construction to puzzle things out from her instructions. Instead I’m using the “custom method” in Palmer & Pletsch’s “Easy, Easier, Easiest” tailoring book, which includes all the hand-sewn details. I’m reading through Shaeffer and hope to use her methods in the next coat and perhaps in putting in the lining for this coat, but the Palmer & Pletsch instructions are much clearer, so I’m going with them for now.

April 5, 2009 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Prepping for CNCH

The Conference of Northern California Handweavers is coming up April 25-27, and I’m signed up for the Sharon Alderman workshop on designing fabrics. The instructions/description for the workshop read like this:

Each participant must come with an idea about a fabric she/he wants to design. Be as specific as possible, use sketches, photos, commercial sewing patterns. If the design is for table linens, bring the plate/cup and saucer you will use with them. If the design is for a skirt fabric for a particular jacket, bring the jacket. For upholstery, bring photos, sketches, swatches of paint, carpet etc.

Each participant will design a different fabric. This is not a round robin workshop.

Weavers intending to design fabric to wear ought to bring a selection of yarns toward the finer side: cotton (16/2 or finer), cottolin (22/2), linen (20/2 or finer), wool (2/20 worsted or woolen spun yarns 1000 ypp or finer, and/or silk. Obviously the choice of fibers is influenced by the climate and when the garment will be worn. The yarns may be textured or plain, single fiber or blends. Bring a variety of colors if possible. Don’t forget neutrals and if, for example, blue is your choice, bring several blues.

This is a good time to bring out odds and ends; they will be sufficient for sampling, even small amounts are useful as accents. Think about the possibility of swapping with other participants to increase the pool of available yarns.

Since I have decided to design for a putative wedding dress, I’m thinking about what I have in stash that would be appropriate. Silk, of course (what else?!). I’d like to use the Lao silks if possible, mainly for sentimental reasons (I really loved my stay in Laos and would like to work it into something special). But I have plenty of 30/2, 60/2, and 140/2 silk on hand, plus some 2/26 Nm 75/25 cashmere/silk that would also be yummy. No problems there.

Pattern-wise, I have something fairly complex in mind. The sewing pattern itself is simple, Butterick 4732:

It’s basically an over-robe over a very simple spaghetti-strap gown.

The gown does not interest me; I’ve done that particular style several times over while doing AIDS Lifecycle costumes. I’d be fine with doing that in a commercial fabric.

But the over-robe! Now THAT has potential.

What I would like to do is an overall pattern of eternity knots for the body of the robe, then add a ribbonlike border along the neckline and front edges of the gown with woven Chinese double-happiness symbols. The eternity knots would be woven in something relatively subdued (cream against white? tussah against white?), and the double-happiness symbols would be something brighter, perhaps a metallic gold yarn on white silk.

(You may remember that I designed some double-happiness symbols back in December…and some eternity knots…it’s where I got the whole idea. I have no idea whether those drafts will work and be legible after wet-finishing, but that’s what one weaves samples for. 🙂 )

Anyway, this is obviously a pretty complex undertaking, which is why I want Sharon’s advice and insight on this.

I am thinking that since the ribbonlike border will likely be woven separately, and will be very narrow, the selvages will probably wind up looking awful. (I’m not that experienced a weaver!) It might make more sense to warp up with a very lightweight silk, like a 140/2 or 60/2, for the selvages and use a thicker silk for the main warp. This way I can tuck the selvages under without adding a lot of bulk.

I am not sure about the yarn weight. The pattern calls for dupioni, lightweight brocade, and/or linen, which suggests either a 60/2 or a 30/2 silk would be appropriate – 60/2 if I’m doing a satin weave and 30/2 if a weave with fewer interlacements. The Lao silk is about the weight of a 60/2, I think, though it varies so widely that it’s hard to measure accurately. I think this would work out nicely for a single row of double-happiness symbols (the threading repeat is about 50 ends). But colors and structures and yarns, oh my! There’s so much to think about and so many variables that I want some advice.

So I am going through my stash, seeing what might be appropriate, and trying to separate out/cone up some appropriate yarns to bring along. (I will probably do some dyeing in prep for the workshop, too.) I’d prefer not to bring a giant box of yarns since Sophie-the-loom is coming with me to CNCH, and she’s quite a load to bring along. I did think about borrowing a small table loom, but I really want to design for a “real” project, and for what I have in mind that pretty much means all 24 shafts.

But what the heck…I will also be bringing a warping board (for other students to use), my AVL warping wheel, two bobbin winders, shuttles, pirns, and a partridge in a pear tree, so what’s one box of yarns on top of that? Thank goodness CNCH is close by enough to drive!

Coat-wise, I have finished tailor-basting the interface to the right front, have sewn down the twill tape on the right front lapel, and am starting to padstitch my first lapel. It’s small and detailed handwork, but I’m enjoying it. But tomorrow night I have set aside to work on Weavolution, so I probably won’t make much more progress until Tuesday.