"Did You Make That?" Part III -- Color Therapy

Some colors recede while others advance.  I knew this, but never really paid enough attention to use it to my advantage.

"Did You Make That?" Part II -- Breaking Free From Cows and Toasters

In my effort to break myself of using silly fabric to sew with, I discovered something kind of cool that requires a scanner and some cropping techniques.

Pick your pattern.  Choose wisely, this can make or break your whole project.

Vogue has a great feature to help choose flattering lines for different proportions like hourglass and pear.

This is the cool part.  If you have the time, scan the pattern onto the computer, save the picture to a program that can be used to edit and crop.  Zero in on the view you want to sew.  Crop everything else out and blow it up to print on as big a piece of paper that you can.  11X17, or bigger.  You should have an image at least 11" tall--if not 17".

Really, this is pretty cool.

Take the pattern to the fabric store with you and use it to drape a corner of the various fabrics over the dress.  Even better, purchase a swatch, while you are in the store or take it home and roughly cut the fabric out to the shape of the outfit.  Lay it on the paper and look at it.  Really look at it.  Picture yourself in it with your proportions.  The thicker waist, the bigger arms, the skinny neck, etc.  This will really help you see the item finished.

M6030 Part 2 -- Choosing the Fabric

This is Part 2 of a series on McCall's pattern M6030.  Choosing the fabric.  As I talked about in Part 1, she had a swatch as an example of the color, not necessarily the fabric.  This proved to be more difficult than I expected, but we persevered and kept walking around the store until we were just holding the swatch up hoping for anything to match.

At one point we'd picked a great fabric that had a beautiful sheen to it and even a slight luminescence to the fabric.  We decided to lay the fabric out on the table at the store to see watch the large pieces might look like as the dress came together.  We made a sad discovery.  The appealing feature of tonal luminescence rolled up on the bolt looked tacky unrolled in a length the dress would have to be.  It was clear with her height and size, we needed to choose a formal wear fabric that had a more matte finish.  However, at this point we had decided to skip the overskirt and create the gown as a plain dress.  In that deep maroon color, we agreed that the lace might look a little more like lingerie than a bridesmaid dress.  Besides, we couldn't find maroon lace, so the decision was pretty much already made for us.

So were back to the drawing board of choosing fabric.  Finally, we decided on a maroon that perfectly matched the swatch had a slight sheen to it.  We ended up finding some organza type material for an over skirt that we didn't think looked like lingerie.  Here is what we decided upon.

Scary Homemade a.k.a. "Did You Make That?"

For a while I got away from sewing.  I had some bad experiences.  That horrible mu mu from that cute little Vogue pattern I loved.  The enormous amount of time I spent on the"Walk Away Dresses" (B4790) only to lose 45 pounds before I could finish the third one and wear the first two more than once.

The other dilemma that began to face me is I found that I didn't like it when someone said, "Did you make that?"  When I sewed that awesomely cute sack-type 90s dress with the farm animals on it and wore it everywhere I went.  People would make a comment such as "What a cute dress."  I could wait for the other shoe to drop and discovered that as proud as I was of my creation and as often as I loved to wear it, I didn't like how others would ask:

"Did you make that?"

I've decided I want to start sewing again, but I want to sew like a big girl.  I want to sew with beautiful fabrics that don't include farm animals, toasters, or treble clefs.  I want to fight that urge to add my "spin" on something that Vogue thought was good enough just the way it is.

For my tip of the day, for your take away:

Pay attention to the dress and what the designer was trying to accomplish.  There's a reason why they are a designer and you are not.  There's a reason why view A has longer sleeves and no ruffles while view B includes a ruffle and no sleeves.  Why only View C is above the knee.  It's about balance, proportion, and the purpose of the item.  Choose appropriate fabrics.  Unless you're an elementary school teacher or a TV character on Saturday morning.  Those really busy cotton fabrics on the "quilting" wall are best left to quilting.

M6030 Part 1 -- Picking the Dress

With the start of May, I'm going to begin a series on sewing the M6030 wedding gown as a bridesmaid dress.  It took some looking for a dress with as few pieces as possible because this dress was going to need to be size up quite a ways.  The skirt was not going to be a big deal, but fitting the bodice to fit a girl with measurements beyond any plus size measurements available, this wasn't going to be an easy feat, but it was surely going to be as fun as usual!  So we did a lot of looking at patterns.

The first consideration was the bride's dress.  It would be easy to pick a beautiful dress and put it together for a special occasion, but we had a bride to consider.  It was important not to over shadow her choice with our choice.  The bride had specified a color: a maroon more on the blue side than red and given all the bridesmaids a swatch of the fabric.  The bridesmaids could wear whatever they wanted.  To complicate things, the bride is extremely petite in height, but not so much in width. *wink*  Her dress looked very much like this M5321 example.

M5321 -- McCall's Stock Photo

M6030 Stock Photo

After much deliberation, we chose M6030.  The gathered sleeves, and  and straight skirt would be easy to alter.  The tough part proved to be the bodice as it had something like five pieces and connected to the sleeves in a unique way.  We did a lot of fittings for the bodice and I took a lot of measurements which I will talk about in Part 3.

The biggest thing I have discovered in a lot of looking at reviews and reading about other projects that have succeeded and failed, is the compulsion to go their own way.  I think I've stated this in other posts, but there's a reason why I'm not a pattern designer.  I really don't know what's best for the pattern.  I haven't always wanted to do what they ask for, but  I try to stick to the instructions and learn something along the way.

This was a very fun dress to sew.  I was please with the finished product and so was the bridesmaid.  I sewed the dress without expecting to get paid, but received two restaurant gift cards in the mail from her parents, so I imagine the dress was well received.

Next week: choosing fabric and starting to study the instructions.

Bags of Scraps

Finished Product!

The organization of my sewing room that started over a year ago has picked back up.  Last night, while watching TV, I went through a whole bunch of fabric that I'd stuffed in bags.

Each time I sew something, for some reason, I keep every tiny little scrap, put them in a plastic grocery bag and they ended up on a shelf in my sewing room.  The volume of scraps was overwhelming.  I didn't know what I had because on top of that, I'd done the same thing with little projects.  I picked fabric and notions and put the whole thing in--you guessed it--a plastic grocery bag.  Consequently, I had way too many bags on my shelves,, didn't know what I had and what to do with it, so I started emptying out those bags and going through them.  I separated everything back where it belonged and measured fabric out by yards.

So this brings us to last night when I brought all the scraps out to the TV.  I started going through the bags and reluctantly throwing out any piece that was less than 12".  I know.  That sounds like it's not a big deal, but I look at the beautiful fabric and I think about making crazy quilts, or hot pads, or, or, or . . .

The truth is, I could have made all those things and used up the fabric once and for all, and today I'm regretting my cut throat mentality last night, but ultimately, at best, it would have been an ugly quilt that I would have spent way too much time on trying to save fabric scraps I hadn't looked at in years.

What a mess!

Look at the shelves full of bags!