Adventures in (clothing) alteration

At church a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about how I'd made my own dress for a gala (at the Library of Congress! I'm still floating a little bit over that one). She said she wouldn't mind learning how to sew, but sewing machines always break on her. I knew exactly what she was talking about; I told her about my own sewing machine trauma and how to this day, I kind of have a preference for hand-sewing over machine sewing.

I also mentioned that I now own a darn reliable sewing machine, if she ever wants to borrow it. She didn't want to borrow it for herself, but she did wonder if I might be willing to hem her wedding dress for her. And the answer was yes, of course!

When I got to her house and saw the dress on her for the first time, it became evident that the most pressing problem she faced was that the shoulders were way too big on her. I pinned the shoulders together, then marked the lines where the new seam lines would need to go by sewing these lines in a contrasting color of thread. (I've discovered the hard way that if you're planning to pick something out, it pays to have that thing be in a color that's easy to see.) Then I took apart the existing shoulder seams, matched up the seam lines I had marked, and basted (temporarily sewed) them together along those new lines.

It was a little more complicated than that because the dress is lined, but that is kinda-sorta-basically what I did during that first evening when I visited her house, thinking (ha!) that I could get this project done in one sewing session. I ended up taking the dress home with me after all, to work on in the evenings.

She also needed the dress hemmed, so I pinned it up at when I was with her, and then last night I finished hand-basting it up. I do plan on machine-sewing the hem in the end, but I wanted to make sure that I really had gotten the length correct before I cut any fabric. I do feel like hand-basting wins over pins pretty much every time; it's both sturdier and more flexible than pins. Not to mention the 100% reduced risk of getting stabbed on accident, either for the sewist or for the person being fitted.

The skirt has a gauzy outer layer and a much more opaque lining. I hand-basted both.

This dress also has a train, which she would like to have out of the way when she is dancing during the reception after the wedding. I did an internet search for how to deal with this, and came up with the idea of a "train pin," which is a way to pin the train up on the outside of the back of the dress, but we couldn't make it look good at all when we tested it out, so that was a no-go. However, she did like the idea of sewing a loop to the middle of the back of the train, so that she could carry her train without using her fingers. I installed this last night.

I used some grosgrain ribbon I had saved from some gift bag, which I couldn't bear to get rid of and which has been sitting in my stash of saved ribbons and strings for I don't even know how many years. I sewed it to the underskirt, and then picked apart the seam on the gauzy overlay fabric so that the loop could poke through. Tomorrow we'll try it on her again, just to make sure all the modifications work well, and then I'll hem the hem with my machine, as originally promised, and then I'll probably be done.

I am still working on the fence-painting project (the weather has been mostly perfect for it) but only felt enough umph to blog about one thing this week. But if you show up next week, I'll tell you about the very exciting world of power washing and about having the perfect roller brush and about why I bought catnip this last week, even though I don't have any plans to use it for a cat. Then there's also the excitement of finding rotting pieces of wood in places where there probably really shouldn't be rotting pieces of wood, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Come back next week and I'll tell all.

Oh. Also. If you want to see three more pages of the graphic novel and read a little bit about it, head on over to cordeliafernwood.com.

Delivering myself from famine

Friends! I am alive. At this exact moment I'm planning to start blogging here again as well as continue the new work blog I started a few weeks ago (at cordeliafernwood.com), but I know myself and I'm not... sure... how long this enthusiasm will last. Also I'm not sure if anyone who reads this blog isn't already my friend on Facebook, but if there is anyone who was waiting with bated breath for me to show up here again, hooray! I'm here again. 

So, at Cordelia Fernwood, I've made some stuff and I've sold some stuff, but I haven't sold very much stuff, which is to be expected at the beginning of a venture like this, but the upshot is that I shall be needing grocery money in the relatively near future, and luckily for me a fence-painting job is available for me to do and be paid for at this very moment. This is because my mother owns the building I live in, and she pays me to be her fixit human for my own house. Eventually I will run out of things to fix and at that point will either have to start selling more stuff or else find a real job, but for now the weather isn't heinous and it's a good time to be working outside.

The last time this fence was painted, the workmanship was, hm, how do I say, dubious. Without any apparent prep work whatsoever, such as sanding or even cleaning the surface to be painted, a high-gloss paint was sprayed on to the existing fence. For my part, after using progressively coarser sandpaper and considering driving an extra fifteen miles to pick up extra extra coarse sandpaper, I finally concluded that primer is my friend. (I also picked up a wire-bristle brush at Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, and it is FABULOSO at scuffing up hard-to-reach high-gloss fence parts that have no business being high-gloss.) Like this:

Also there is the top-end-of-the-fence-boards situation. Which is to say, none of the exposed end grain on the tops of the boards got painted during this high-gloss spray-painting job, but were left to weather naturally, which results in stuff like this:

In some cases, the ends don't have moss on them, but in some cases they do. I'm planning to paint the non-mossy ones, just to preserve them a tiny bit longer, but quite frankly the whole thing is going to have to be completely rebuilt within the next five to ten years, so I'm constantly wondering to myself which effort is worth it and which is not.

I did finally conclude that I should replace the most rotten boards on the gate, though. I use the gate every time I leave the house, and one of the boards on the front had rotted out so badly that only the screws that had held it in place were left at the top.

Behold the front of the gate, which already has three boards I've replaced (it's hard to tell, but they're a slightly different color from everything else because I primed them before I installed them ;)

Since I am a fan of whimsy and not a fan of regretting my decisions, I've decided that the crooked board on the far left on the front side is whimsical, and that I don't regret at all the fact that I totally forgot to sight down the long side of the board to make sure it was straight before I bought it. Really truly, though, I actually do think it kind of looks cute, and I'm also not kidding about the liking whimsy thing. 

You can see that the board on the far left on the inside of the gate is pretty ripped up on the bottom. I wasn't originally planning to replace it, but replacing the boards on the front of the gate went so well that I'm sort of thinking maybe I will after all. 

Aaand I'm out of time to write. Probably for the best. Check out cordeliafernwood.com if you're curious about what the first pages of the unfinished graphic novel look like, or what the mostly-finished paper Nativity or paper Easter Set look like, or if you want to read more ramblings about creative work and, like, stuff.