Category: wardrobe

a new dress (sort of)

For a few years now I’ve kept a practice of making myself a new dress for my birthday. This week as I was finishing up Cobbled Bodice Attempt #5 on a dress by a careless and sloppy designer I both love and hate (Tina Givens, IYKYK), it occurred to me that I should be making myself a new dress to celebrate my Gramma’s birthday instead (or in addition to). My Gramma was a professional sewist, making and altering things for people right up to the day she died. She gave me the skills and the confidence to make my own clothes. She taught me how to read and use a sewing pattern while guiding me through making the most fiddly and ridiculous shirt I’ve ever sewn, with cuffs and buttonholes and an asymetrical closure and an incredible ruffle that ran all the way up the front opening and around the collar. She bought me my first sewing machine, and bequeathed me her last one, which I still use. She would have turned 99 today.

As I should have expected, the bodice fix I was attempting didn’t work out (um hi, it took me five tries to realise it’s not the bodice that’s the problem). That dress is back on the sewing room floor, destined to become a skirt or rags, and I’ll make a whole post about my struggles with Tina Givens and her beautiful yet deeply crappy patterns another day. Fortunately, I had another dress nearly finished so I had something far better and more beautiful to wear today than that utter failure.

meandthecaptain

Pattern details: like most of what I make, this dress is a pastiche. The mullety two-layer skirt is from the Metamorphic Dress by Sew Liberated (pattern link: Metamorphic Dress). I had at first made this using the same bodice pattern I used for my thesis dresses, an apron-ish style I still love but the shoulder straps of which tend to fall down constantly from my narrow shoulders. I’m working my way slowly through my closet and remaking everything that’s not perfectly comfortable, the majority of which have that irritating strap problem. I adapted this new bodice from the Orchard Dress by Helen’s Closet (pattern link: Orchard Dress). I wore it to the public library knitting club today and the straps didn’t fall off once!

The top layer fabric is pieced together from large flour sack towels that I dyed with tea and screenprinted with all of my favourite motifs: cartoony flowers, clusters of floating arches, twisting segments of warped spacetime, and layers of gritty monoprinting blocked out with paper cutouts. The bottom layer is my old standby, the SCA’s favourite chemise cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, Illinois, dyed a softly mottled pale olive tan with goldenrod flowers and iron water.

The Captain, whose pose I’m trying to copy here, is wearing my Gramma’s ribbon full of pins won in the Senior Games, along with my Granddad’s steam show hat full of badges.

birthday dress

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I’ve been slammed lately with a big bookbinding commission that I just finished up, but found a bit of time to sew up a new dress for my birthday, a newish tradition. I cut into the good linen with an untested pattern but it worked out okay.

This is a shortened version of the Skyline Dress by Syd Graham (buy the pattern here: Etsy link). I eliminated the bottom tier and lengthened the top tier, and also made the straps fixed instead of adjustable (because the adjustability relies on a bow tied over one shoulder blade, which I know from experience isn’t something I’m going to enjoy wearing). It’s drafted for someone a bit taller than me and on my next one I’ll shorten the bodice. I may go back and shorten it on this version as well.

This is handkerchief weight linen that I dyed with willow leaves and iron. It’s not as drab as it looks in the photos but still pretty drab and I may end up dyeing it again. Worn on my birthday as above, overtop of an ecoprinted cotton gauze Yesterday Dress by Caramiya Maui (shop link: Caramiya Maui) and my indigo dyed toile skirt that I made from an old dress that used to belong to my late mother in law.

Here’s how I wore it again the next day, much more rumpled, over leggings and a safety orange Slocan Tank by Helen’s Closet (shop link: Helen’s Closet). Yeah, I pose the same way every day, I guess.

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Overall I’m happy with the relaxed fit and layerability of this and I’ll definitely make it again. I’m already planning a long tiered patchwork version, and will try the short version next time with a trapezoidal skirt instead of a rectangle. I feel a binge coming on!

swamp hag

a white woman with brown hair and tattoos, viewed from the neck down, wearing a sleeveless olive drab dress and standing in front of three mannequins draped in philodendron fronds.

I made some alterations this week on this dress that I call my swamp hag gown, which has been through a few different iterations already. I originally made it for my 50th birthday, out of a thrifted gray cotton curtain ecoprinted with leaves from my garden, using the Woolfork dress pattern by Jacqueline Cieslak (pattern link: Woolfork pattern). It’s a gorgeous pattern but I felt like I had too much coverage around the shoulders for my wild hot flashing perimenopause lifestyle, so I chopped it off just below the bust dart and added a new bodice using the lining pieces from the Ogden Cami by True Bias (pattern link: Ogden Cami pattern). Then after a while I bundled the dress back into the dirty pot and ecoprinted it again with leaves off our cherry tree, to ramp up the swampiness.

I had to cut the front of that new bodice just slightly off grain due to fabric constraints and of course that caused the whole dress to shift slightly to my left, which I lived with for a while but my sternum tattoo made the off-centredness very obvious so finally, a couple of weeks ago, I made another new bodice. In the meantime I had found a huge piece of the original fabric (there’s enough for a whole second dress) so was able to cut it luxuriously straight. That’s when I had to accept that the Ogden bodice doesn’t work all that well for my body and you’re not even going to see that version because it pushed my breasts down too uncomfortably to even pose for a photo. Meanwhile I had overdyed the whole thing to an olive green much richer than what shows up in the photo, using goldenrod flowers from the alley and a dip in ferrous sulfate.

Fourth time’s the charm for this dress as I’ve now gotten it pretty close to perfect, using the bodice from Caramiya Maui’s Yesterday Dress (pattern link: Yesterday Dress pattern), which is quickly becoming my go-to pattern. I did a simple narrow shoulder adjustment by shifting about 7mm from the centre fold to the side seam, as my earlier dresses made from this pattern tend to slip off my shoulders. It’s much better but still a little slippy so next time I’ll angle the straps inward a smidge and maybe also shorten them just a little.

close up of the chest and upper arms of a white woman with brown curly hair and tattoos wearing a sleeveless dress in brown and olive green.

The new bodice is a handkerchief weight linen that I dyed with black walnut hulls; not quite the same shade as the new colour of the dress but this walnut fabric has already faded a bit in another dress so I know it’ll be closer one day. Probably just in time for another trip through the dye pot.

Here’s a peek at the lining, indigo dyed cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, IL, and the hand finishing stitches on the bias binding. I love me a sweet hand finish. I even found a brown thread in my Gramma’s sewing stuff that’s an exact match for the walnut dyed linen.

close up of a needle and thread stitching a hem of brown linen down over blue cotton.

And these are the earlier versions of the dress. Left, an ecoprinted Woolfork on my 50th birthday. Middle, with a new skimpier bodice more appropriate for the heat of middle age. Right, overprinted with rusty cans and cherry leaves.

a side to side comparison of three different versions of a gray sleeveless dress, modeled by a white woman with long hair and tattoos viewed from the neck down.

restartitis

This handspun was given to me by Stacie years and years ago, and immediately knit up into these socks, toe-up in order to squeeze out every last bit of gorgeous yarn. They’ve never been worn, because an afterthought heel is the worst and toe-up socks are terrible and no bind off in the world is both stretchy enough for a sock cuff while still being attractive and I don’t know what I was thinking.
So! These are finally getting fixed, completely reknit from the top down, with a nice sturdy long-tail cast on and a perfectly fitted half-handkerchief heel, as socks should be. Of course I’m too lazy to properly unravel and take the kink out (although not too lazy to rip and reknit an entire pair of socks), so the pretty pattern of the first sock looks rather sloppy in the second. Let’s hope it blocks out.

what I’m working on today 

This is two layers of jersey fabric basted together, with woodblock printing on the top layer. It’s already been cut, before the printing, into pattern pieces for a swingy, a-line, above-the-knee skirt. Now I’m stitching around some of the motifs and cutting away parts of the top fabric to reveal the contrasting fabric beneath.

In an effort to get away from buying clothing, I’m working on a small series of these that will be part of my new uniform. Here are the panels for a second skirt, printed this morning with the leftover ink from a Block Printing on T-shirts class I taught in the studio last night.

Yeah, they’re both red. Im trying to use up the fabric I have! And they’re not the same red! The first one is a 1×1 rib, and more orangey, printed in black, white, and pale olive green with an olive green backing, while the second is a darker red, printed in neon orange, blue, and white, with a brilliant turquoise backing. Unfortunately the olive and turquoise aren’t great for the outer layer thanks to a very obvious fade/dirt line where they were folded along the end of the bolts. All of this came from McKay’s, the mythical Fabric Warehouse That Time Forgot. Yup, the one in the wet old barn with squirrels living in the roof and the terrifying toilet chute and the acres and acres of smelly old polyester overlock from the 70s. My favourite place! No, really.