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.