Tuesday morning – first day in my sewing week. Wrote a test first thing, then started with morning devotions – a Mars Hill sermon. Then starting on some swiss waists/under bust corsets for a local theater group, then working on my new 1950s dress.
Mornings are good. I’m thinking of moving my alarms way forward to maximise the morning times I get.
I’m slowly plugging away on work on my fiancee’s new bunad shirt. I’ve challenged myself to do it all by hand and do it in spurts when I’m in the mood to sit down and work on something while watching TV or a movie.
Here’s a quick guide of how to do a whipped seam – it’s a wonderful way to do the edge of collars and cuffs on 18th century shirts!
First – fold over the edge you want to sew approximately 1/4″.
The edge folded over the whole length.
Fold the piece in half and pin.
Starting at the bottom edge (not the folded edge, but the raw edges on the bottom of the cuff/collar. Take tiny stitches about a 1/16th of an inch down from the folded edges, approximately a 1/16th apart.
Here you can see the tiny stitches. They need to be tight, but not tight enough to start gathering the fabric together.
Here you can see the finished seam from the outside – it’s a very firm, very solid seam.
Again, you can see the corner here. This style of seam on collars and cuffs makes wonderful corners!
And the finished, folded edge. You can see that the seam has a tiny bit of a roll to it on each side. That’s from the whipped fabric beneath. Makes a nice firm edge on each side of the cuff or collar!
Hopefully I’ll continue documenting how this shirt gets put together – right now, the sleeves need to be gathered and attached to the cuffs. More tiny sewing – beautiful >1/8th rolled hems and tiny gathers. I must be a sucker for punishment because this is fantastically fun.
ElaineMay over at BurdaStyle posted a free pattern, the Coffee Date Dress way back in 2009. I’ve been thinking about making it since then but only got around to it now. I had just over two yards of a rust colored 1970s permament press double knit – not the ideal fabric, but something I needed to use up. Something along the lines of the Coffee Date dress seemed about the right thing to make out of it, beyond some sort of 1970s power suit.
Instead of the Coffee Date Dress skirt, I used the pattern from Butterick 5748, one of the vintage reproduction patterns Butterick has issued in the past few years. It’s a simple circle skirt and went really well with the bodice.
I did have some issues with the bodice pattern on the Coffee Date Dress pattern. The waist was about 3 inches too big and I had to take a large wedge out of the size – the same size wedge as the waist dart. I thought that was rather unusual, probably because the pattern had been graded strangely. The pattern fits wonderfully besides that. I think it’d look nicer on a gal with less wide shoulders – the bodice fits rather slimmly on the shoulders, almost to the point where it needs a racer back bra underneath. One other tiny qualm is that the bodice ruffle guide lines aren’t graded. I used the old grade lines from the original pattern (32″ bust vs a 36″ bust) and it’s a smaller footprint, ruffle wise, than the original pattern.
The fabric is a double knit, so I didn’t hem the skirt or the ruffle. Simple and easy! I already had the thread and fabric, so the whole dress cost $1.50 – the price of a zipper!
….from my very sore back back. After almost a month of no proper computer desk out here in my sewing room/grotto/office, I finally managed to rearrange my furniture and squeeze in another little table. See that grin? That’s the grin of no more sore back from long hours hunched over on the floor or on my couch.
And now back to sewing….erm, um, writing powerpoints for a new class I’m teaching, writing an outline for the same and then maybe, just maybe I might get to working on the future-sister-in-law’s wedding dress.
It’s a weird stage of life – graduating from college, moving home, getting engaged, planning a wedding, looking at buying houses – and trying to be productive without actually having a job. We’re working on that. However, I do have a really long list of sewing jobs that need to get done. Currently it’s going something like this -
Basically, I’ve got more than enough to keep me busy. For a long time.
Draping the front of my wedding dress pattern. I think I need to swing some bust darts, but so far, so good!
Back of the dress, first attempt. We’ll see how this goes when it actually gets put on me and not a inferior and less curvaceous copy of myself.
And my fiance’s bunad shirt. I don’t normally cross stitch, so don’t judge. It’s hard in a non-even-weave fabric!
It’s time to get back into the swing of things. I just graduated from Corban University with a degree in Secondary Social Studies Education. Currently I’m waiting for my degree to be posted so I can apply for my Oregon teaching license so I can apply for my Washington license. And then I can finally apply for substitute teaching jobs.
Graduating also means being done with student teaching, which is a blessing! It’s wonderful to have a life again. Additionally, my summer job of kayak guiding is very summer centric, so I have lots of time on my hands right now.
As such I’ve been working on clearing out our cottage/playhouse and setting it up as sewing room. It’s a little chilly out there with single paned windows, so my first step was to install some temporary and cheap storm windows, using a plastic drop cloth and a staple gun.
We’ll see how they end up working out, but so far it’s much warmer in there! The next few days I’ll be fine visiting family, but after that? Let the sewing begin!
Well, I got this dress done JUST in the nick of time – 10:00pm the night before I left to go back to school! I tried to be super industrious this time and take lots of photos of the construction, but I still didn’t manage to fully document the process. Here are some of the highlights.
Here’s the inside of the back section of the skirt. It’s cartridge pleated, but has an unusual method of finishing the top edge. I whipstitched the binding onto the front part of the skirt, folded it over and whipstitched again on the back. 
The front of the bunad is is pleated. Transitioning from cartridge pleats to knife pleats posed a challenge. I kept the folded over edge, backstitched the binding and then folded it over and stitched it in the back.
To attach the skirt to the bodice, I whipstitched the very base of the binding to the base of the bodice. Then, I backstitched through the bodice into the back of the skirt binding to keep everything nice and secure. It’s the third time I’ve tried to attach a skirt and bodice with this method of skirt binding, and I think I’ve finally mastered it this time.
The skirt hem is padded with two layers of wool flannel that were hand basted then machine quilted, and then a decorative layer applied – a band of red, a band of black, a band of red and then green piping. This was hand applied to the skirt and then the bottom bound in black wool.
Here’s the back of the hem – the facing is backstitched for security. I didn’t want it to get accidentally stepped out while dancing.
Here’s the finished back of the bunad. I don’t have a picture of the full bunad, sadly, but you can see some of the neat details here – it’s backstitched around each edge of the bodice. The original Amli bunads have really cool binding on all the edges and ribbon trim on the back, but those are REALLY hard to get outside of Norway.
The front has kind of a cool dog legged closure. My client really wanted to be able to wear it without an apron if at all possible, so I worked in a way to do it. A card woven belt is worn over at the waistline.
And last but not least, here are some sketches I did of what the finished bunad will look like on. I’ve done digital painting on and off, and it was fun to get back into it again!
And with the apron . . . using a jacquard from Duran Textiles, which is where my client is planning on getting apron fabric from sometime in the future. You can see that fabric below - 
Sometime in the near future I hope to put together a post on resource on making bunads from Amli. There’s not that much out there in English, and translating costume information from Norwegian is quite frustrating! However, I was able to dig up some good resources that I’d like to put together for others who might want to make this bunad.
Bunad from Amli, via Bunad Magasinet
This is my next project – a lovely bunad for a gal in our dance group. She chose the bunad from Amli, and I think it’ll be a fantastically flattering cut for her! Final fitting of the pattern draft is this afternoon, and then it’s off to buy fabric and trim! I’m not going to be making it with an apron, at her request, and I reject embroidery out of hand anyway!
Hopefully I’ll blog the construction of this better than I normally blog projects. There are some really interesting construction details that I’m hoping to finally master . . . third time’s the charm, right!
When I read about the planned Deco Picnic at the Pittock Mansion on Solanah’s blog, it was clear that we were going. No questions asked.
So I managed to get out of choir, and we gathered up those friends that were available to go, and off we went! It was absolutely fantastic!
I’ve been into the vintage aesthetic for many years, and sewing vintage clothes for the past three-four years. But despite reading many blogs of like minded people, I had never actually connected with any of them. It was lovely to meet Solanah and friends, and just enjoy wearing pretty clothes for the day.
In summary? Totally worth the hassle of spending all day in pretty clothes instead of doing homework! SO much fun and I definitely want to do more events like this in the future. It’s like reenacting, but so much more relaxed and easy going – less interaction with guests and more enjoying the setting.
Thank you so much, Solanah et all!
Well, it’s been another one of those absolutely fascinating Friday nights. I spent the entire evening at home sewing and cooking. Totally the typical life of a college student, right?
But seriously. Living in an apartment/townhouse with a really limited dining hall meal plan has thrown me for a loop some nights when I’m completely bushed and just want to curl up on the couch and watch Netflix. The solution? Freezer meals! Tonight I mixed up a batch of breakfast burritos (flour tortillas, scrambled eggs, chorizo sausage, sauteed onions and oven fried potatoes…and the ever essential tapatio!) that got wrapped up in foil and put in the freezer. Six eggs, a single pack of chorizo sausage (can’t remember how much it weighed), half an onion, four small potatoes and seven tortillas later I had a batch of very substantial dinner entrees.
Some theatre guys dropped by to hang out right as I was finishing the breakfast burritos, so when they left at 11:00, I figured that since no roommates were back yet I might as well throw together some chicken pot pie mix. Easy enough at almost midnight, right? It actually went surprisingly well. The only issue was that it turned out quite a bit too salty.
Enough of food! Hopefully sometime tomorrow I’ll have a some pictures of the Cinderella ballgown to put up, and documentation of the Deco Picnic that we went to on Thursday.
