Five Grads, One Dress - The Seamstress' Cut

I started taking alterations a couple months back to round out my services for clients and because I discovered I actually liked doing them (nothing like a nice, easy hem job to balance out the longer projects!).  Shortly after I made this decision, Linda Hill, our area's most reputable home-based alterations lady, contacted me to se if I was interested in taking her overflow.  Yes, m'am!  (Must have been destiny at work . . .)

Elle's mother Mary in the dress 1980.  Source: Wednesday Journal

This project came to me via Linda.  The public high school in Oak Park requires that graduating ladies wear long white dresses.  The daughter of Linda's friend needed a family dress altered but Linda didn't have room in her schedule.  I almost passed but then found a way to stretch my schedule and I'm so glad that I did.  The dress was written up in a local paper with annoyingly sadly no mention of the seamstress, so I thought I'd provide some behind-the-scenes coverage.  You can read the newspaper version with some great quotes from the ladies who wore the dress and additional photos of the dress in action here.



Dress as it came to me

Dress insides

The dress had been worn by four women in the family so far: Elle's mother Mary, Mary's older sisters Nancy and Peggy, and Mary's oldest daughter Maranda.  Now it was Elle's turn, but the dress just didn't fit - Elle is a small person, but bustier than her aunts/sister.  Linda passed along some suggestions when she passed me her client and I took it from there!

First I carefully unpicked the side seams and took out the side seam zipper (this dress is now 35-years-old).  Then I basted fabric scraps at the side seam so that I could see how much extra room was needed (when Elle first tried on the dress for me, she couldn't pull it down over her girls!). 

I used the scraps to make a pattern piece for what needed to be added at the side seam:

I balanced out the two sides before creating a pattern

The dress has a tie that was just barely wide enough to use in the side seams, so I reduced the SA to 1/4", crossed my fingers and cut.  Taking out the side seam stiches had left small but visible thread holes in the fabric.  The holes bugged me now that the seam allowance was smaller, so I fused white knit tricot interfacing to the back side of the fabric, and voila!  no more holes.

I sewed the new side seam panels in place, replaced the old zipper with an invisible zipper, added a button hole and button to the tie, reduced the seam allowances in the lining to 1/4" and we were ready for the day.  Not an ideal alteration, but it worked!

I loved that I got to help extend the life of this dress.  It was both exhilarating and terrifying to work with something that had so many memories attached to it.  Elle's face made it so worthwhile!

School Projects

Belly, my oldest daughter, finished her first year of school last week.  Kindergarten - check, onto First Grade!  I wanted to make gifts for her teachers but when you include aids and specials and that meant eight gifts.  I left this 'till the final week to do, so this meant something pretty quick. 

Belly's contribution:

My contribution:

Zippered pouches for aids and specials

Book totes from apple corduroy for her main teachers

 

I figured her two male teachers wouldn't want a pretty little zippered pouch so they got Chipotle gift certificates instead.  The only simple male sewing project I could think of was boxer shorts and that didn't seem appropriate!

 



To save time, I interfaced the pouch fabric with a fabric-like fusible interfacing (Pellon SF101 shape-flex woven interfacing) instead of lining them.  I sewed the pouches up on my fancy serger using a piping foot to attach the zippers, and each one only took about 15 minutes from cutting to fusing to sewing. 


I also just hit my one year milestone with teaching sewing.  I teach primarily at The Little Bits Workshop in River Forest (if you're local and you want to take a class, go here) and I really liked the skirt project I led on Monday night.  I've found that while students dream about sewing their own clothes, I have trouble filling those classes with students opting instead for simple home dec project classes.  I had a group of students from my last beginner sewing session who were a bit more gung-ho, so I put together a one-night class to teach them to make a simple jersey skirt. 

My inspiration was this skirt, which I found on Pinterest, but I changed the drafting formula and the waistband:



Elle Apparel Socialite Skirt - tutorial

I made a couple sample skirts (I'm wearing the stripey one as I type), one with pleats and one without:

Keep in mind that my students have only been sewing for about a month and not all of them even have a sewing machine at home.  Here's what they made in three hours, from drafting to cutting to sewing jersey fabric for the first time:

You can't see it in this photo, but Nora did a fantastic job matching stripes!

My mantra through the class was, "Your first skirt won't be your best skirt," but they turned out really well.  I can't wait to see what their second and third skirts look like!

OSB: Obsessive Sewing Behavior

I finally bought the Ikea shelving I've been saving up for to help organize my fabric stash.  I like having all that fabric out and visible - all that beauty is inspiring to me and I've found fabric to be a great sales tool with clients.  And, since I'm now a bit embarrassed by the sheer amount of fabric I have, I think having it out will stop me ordering any new fabric anytime soon.



Home Dec & Quilting Cottons

Apparel Fabric - wovens on left, knit/jersey on right

Getting the shelves sparked a sewing room reorganization, specifically all my fabric scraps and bags of to-be-refashioned clothing.  Organizing my scraps seemed perfectly practical to me, but my husband thought I'd gone down a rabbit hole of OCD behavior.  It took about four episodes of Damages (crime shows are my trash TV of choice), but I managed to divide the scraps into five categories: jersey/woven scraps for scarves (which includes t-shirts that aren't good enough to be refashioned for wear), jersey scraps for flowers, woven scraps for facings, woven scraps for flowers and zippered pouches, and good-for-nothing scraps that needed to be thrown away.  And here's what I ended up with:

Jersey Scraps

Woven scraps

Everything all tucked away (don't ask about those other tubs)

Good-for-nothing scraps

I use the scraps in my own projects and also in camps/classes, so this all seemed perfectly normal to me.  But earlier in the week I got a call from my friend Nancy who had several large bags of cut out patterns that she needed to give away.  And not just the patterns, but fabric cut to go with the patterns.  Nancy had already pulled the ones that she wanted and there were still three large bags/boxes for me to go through.  Nancy's first job as a costume designer was with a one-woman shop in a small town in Illinois.  Nancy recently heard from the woman she worked for there, because she was clearing out her sewing room.  The woman is sick and doesn't want her husband to have to go through her sewing room after she's gone.

Nancy and I just didn't know what to make of the cut fabric/patterns.  Just to give you a sense of scale, here's what I brought home:

 

Oh yes, I also got some serger thread and a bag of odds n' ends.

That's 11 patterns with fabric already cut out all tucked into baggies (and some baggies had multiple sets of fabric in them).  And there were at least two large bags of these baggies left at Nancy's. 

Cutting out fabric is my least favorite part of the process, so I will sometimes spend a day cutting out a bunch of stuff so that I don't have to do it again for a while.  But the amount of work that went into cutting about all of these patterns just boggles my mind.  Nancy and I couldn't fathom why she did all of this work - there was at least a year's worth of sewing in the bags that Nancy brought home.  One of Nancy's friends suggested that maybe she wasn't well enough to do the actual sewing, but cutting out the fabric was comforting in some way.  Maybe.

So I have this new treasure, thanks to another woman's illness and obsessive cutting.  And I now feel responsible for finishing what she started.  It will make for some poignant sewing.