Wedding Dress Progress Part IV: Sewing Silk and Assembling Skirt and Bodice

Good news: THE dress finally looks like a dress! Skirt and bodice are attached (including the lining), flowers are hand sewn on and the zipper has been inserted, yeah. The only thing missing now is the hem and bustle! I can't show you the full dress before I get married (6 weeks to go, so be patient), so I'm showing you some detail shots instead.

This post will be mainly about my experience when working with silk. I used the silk for the lining, but forgot to take pictures of it. So here are some random pics :)

The skirt is without the lining in this photo. 

The silk didn't like me at all and I didn't like it either because there were a couple of hiccups on the way from silk to skirt.

1. Should you decide to gelantin bath your silk - fold it before putting it into the bucket. Otherwise you will have a wrinkly mess that takes a long time to iron. I had to iron with steam and because it took so long, the steam was condensing on the metal of my iron board and from there dripping onto my silk. Water stains!

2. If there is any writing on the selvage of the silk (like 100% silk for example) try to cut if off before the gelantin bath because it could stain you fabric. Mine did. But luckily with the chiffon layer on top you can't see it.

Assembled bodice with straps! Yes my dress is having straps, because otherwise it would fall down. There is not enough boning in there to hold it up.

3. I decided to cut my lace single layered and layed it out in front of the window. Having cut out the first piece, I realised that my silk had a purple or white shimmer depending from which side I looked. I was fretting for 2 hours about it and then found out that if you layed out the fabric the other way around the shimmer didn't change. So when looking towards the window it would always shimmer purple and when looking towards the room it shimmers always white, phew.

4. Make sure you have enough fabric - I was short 2 meters - I was just missing the last piece. And pay attention how you lay your pattern pieces down. Ups, I was just frolicking about what else I could do with that lovely leftover silk, when I realised I had layed out my pattern piece the wrong side up. I only realised when I had cut 3/4 of it. Why not earlier?

when sewing silk - use loads of pins!

5. Finally sewing! I pinned every 1" and I don't think it was enough because my seams are twisting. It doesn't show that much because I can iron it out with some steam. I french seamed all seams (silk and chiffon) and my first seam was 3/8" and my second/last one 1/4". To get a neat 1/4" I bought a 1/4" foot which has a little guide on it. I can only recommend it. It made sewing these thin seams much easier.

My 1/4'' foot - I can only highly recommend it!

Now back to the dress construction: Before I attached the chiffon skirt or silk skirt to the bodices, I washed them both to remove any starch or gelatin. I was worried about having any residues left so I did a two hours soak first and then but them (separately) into the handwashing program of my washing machine. I didn't wash the bodice to avoid getting soggy pleats.

I couldn't decide how I would attach the skirt to the bodice. My pattern suggested to first sew outer skirt fabric and lining together and then attach it to the bodice. But that meant the zipper would show on the inside. Why would you use a lining then? The lining is supposed to cover the zipper. So I sewed the outer skirt fabric to the bodice outer fabric and then I sewed the skirt lining to the bodice lining.

handstitched ribbon

Before the zipper could go in, I had to hand stitch the satin ribbon in place. It has the same color as the straps. I attached it on top of the underbust seam and when attaching it with tiny back stitches took care to only catch the outer fabric and not the lining.

I pinned and stitched the ribbon onto the dress when having it on the dress form - just to make sure the dress was falling straight. 

One last pic: The dress with it's complete lining and ribbon attached.

I'm so glad that I decided to add a train. I love it :) So thanks to everybody who encouraged me to do so. I still have to figure out how to add the bustle so that I can take the train up when we are at the restaurant.

You can't imagine how excited I am. Only six more weeks to go and I will be Mrs :) Make-up and hair have been sorted out, phew. We also had our pre-wedding meeting with the registrar which left me more confused and anxious then before.

I'm hoping to get the next post up a bit sooner now that most of the sewing is done. In case you wonder, no I'm not working on anything else other than the wedding dress, its lace bolero, ring cushion and pouch. So plenty to do! I would love to sew some dresses especially because I'm seeing all your lovely ones. But that has to wait - so keep posting and help me over my no-summer-dress-sewing.

Wedding Dress Progress Part II: Pleating Chiffon and Sewing the Chiffon Skirt

Are you already wondering if I make any progress on my wedding dress?! I've started too and it helps that I have forbidden myself to sew anything else until it is finished. I still have 3 month time, but can feel a bit of pressure already.

Excuse my untidy sewing room and focus on the pinned dress please!

At least the dress is now my mean concern as we have sorted out the restaurant, photographer, bouquet, hair and make-up. It will be a beautiful day and I will be hopefully wearing my dream dress.

Progress so far:

I've sewn the chiffon skirt with mini french seams. Before cutting the chiffon, I sprayed it with starch and ironed it dry. It worked beautifully and made the chiffon crisp. So I had no problems sewing the tiny french seams. Because of the starch the dress has no drape at the moment. I hope it will wash out easily.

(I would recommend you remove the starch spray bottle from the bathroom after you are done, otherwise you might confuse it with hair spray in the morning. But I can attest that starch gives your hair a really good hold - for the whole day.)

I've pleated the center front piece. It took me four tries. The problem was that although the pleats looked ok, the center piece didn't had the right size suggesting that my pleats weren't even. So I tried different methods to mark the pleats:  I tried twice to use tailor tucks to mark the pleats and then I tried with a fabric pen and ruler to draw lines.

a mess of tailor tucks - didn't help.

Both methods should have guarantied accuracy, but still the piece was too small. Chiffon is not the best material to be pleated because it is still slippery even after starch treatment. To stabilise it I fused the thinnest fusible interfacing I had to the chiffon before cutting out and it is now really nice and even.

Left: chiffon stabilised with fusible interfacing. Right: not stabilised. Can you see the size difference?

I've gelatin bathed the silk, gasp, to make it less slippery (I was not sure if I could use starch and other bloggers made good experiences with the gelatin. I can only recommend that you fold your fabric before bathing it because otherwise you have a crumbly mess that you can't entangle when wet because the silk might tear. After drying the silk felt stiff like a board and was a mess of folds. I've managed to iron most of them out and the silk is still in one piece. Now the bad news: I'm not having enough to cut the back panel with the train. That's because initially I didn't want a train and thus bought less. But I'm pretty confident that I will be able to get more in Goldhawk Road (that's where I bought it). Now the question: should I cut into the silk now or wait until I have more?

Silk on the ironing board: Left ironed and right, obviously, not.

Together with a very motivating friend (wink Charlie) I pinned the parts of the dress on my dress form. It looks really nice, especially with the lace mesh flowers and ribbon. I'm thinking about sewing a lace cardigan with the lace you can see.

I've bought horsehair braid, boning and bra cups. Everything will go in the tiny bodice to stabilise it. I'm really scared of sewing these in. Especially because I've never sewn with any of these before. But with the long bank holiday ahead I will hopefully be able to tackle them!

PS: I'm sorry for the bad picture quality, but work in progress means mobile phone photos!

Hepburn Dress in Chiffon

Finally, I'm back online and my life slowly settles into a routine - I hope. I'm not sewing much at the moment, because coming home from my new job just leaves me exhausted and yearning for bed. But nonetheless I have a few makes to share with you that I made before moving :)

So let me show you my version of the Hepburn Dress, which is a pattern by Audrey & Me. Audrey & Me patterns are designed by my friend Charlie from thisblogisnotforyou. Maybe you have heard about them, if not you are definitively missing out ;) I was lucky enough to test the Hepburn Dress pattern before it's release---actually I was getting on poor Charlie's nerves asking "Is it ready yet? Can I test it? I want to make it before I move, please". Haha...

I was especially thrilled to sew this pattern because I wanted to sew with Chiffon. Sewing with Chiffon was on my 2014 sewing list. I was super terrified of sewing with Chiffon and thought it would be a good idea to learn to sew with it. Charlie's pattern came to the rescue...

Pattern: Hepburn Dress by Audrey & Me pattern. PDF pattern. I made version 1, which has pleats at the neckline and boxpleats at the skirt. The pattern comes with lining instructions for the bodice.

Fabric: Butterfly Chiffon for the outer shell and a pink polyester rayon for the lining. The butterfly chiffon I got from Goldhawk Road and the rayon I bought from Minerva Crafts, when they were having a sale a while ago. I was really curios about what rayon is, as I can't get it at Goldhawk Road. And I love it.

Alterations:  Surprisingly enough, I hardly had to do any alterations! I only did my standard forward shoulder adjustment and moved the bust dart in the lining down by 1". I cut a size 10 for the bust and graded to size 12 for the waist. I think the dress sits a bit snug around my bust, so next time I will cut the bust at size 12 as well.

Construction: To make sewing with Chiffon easier, I followed the instructions of how to sew with Chiffon by Andrea posted on cation designs. Thus I soaked my massive amount of fabric (I think it was 2.5 meters) in a bowl with corn starch and water. Which should stabilise the chiffon. I then ironed the fabric dry. Which was a total mess with the starched water dropping everywhere and soaking my ironing board despite me constantly changing the towels beneath the fabric. It took me one hour to get it dry and the fabric seemed to become stiff. (The stiffness didn't go away after washing so I guess I melted the polyester???)

The actual sewing wasn't a problem at all. I finished all seams with french seams to achieve a nice and tidy finish. I even managed to put a french seam below the zipper thanks to the description from Mercury-Handmade fashion. However, there was one point that I didn't think through when choosing my lining fabric: You can see the darts and seams through the shell because I chose a contrast lining, buh. I also managed to put the lining wrong way in. With the darts looking towards the shell. I don't mind too much and next time I will know better.

To line the skirt, I just assembled two skirts - one made from shell and one from lining fabric. So you can say I sewed the dress twice :) I hand stitched lining and shell together at the waist seam, which took me 2 hours. I attempted first to stitch in the ditch by machine, but due to the slippery fabrics, the stitches were not at all in the ditch!

The hems are finished with the rolled hem function of my overlocker. So quick :)

Have I worn it yet? I did several times. It goes perfectly with my Hetty Cardigan and white tights and these cute pink shoes I bought recently (which you can see only in the first pic).

Will I make it again? Yes I will for sure. Maybe not this year, because I'm feeling already to cold to wear sleeveless dresses, but definitively next year :)