Podcast: Where Do I Begin (To Catch Up)?

By Dr. Julie-Ann, on May 27th, 2010

Yes, folks, the title says it all. I actually recorded a podcast last night. *Yay!*

In the podcast, I talk about the projects I’ve made for my Flat Pattern Making course. I don’t have a photo of my basic block but here are the others….

Pleated and lined dress:

Here are the 18 pattern pieces I had to create for the dress:

Here are photos of the muslin:

You can’t really tell that those are box pleats in the skirt…I should have taken a close-up but things are kind of crazy at the beginning of class when I was taking these photos.

Finished dress out of fashion fabric. I found the fabric at JoAnns in the quilting section and fell in love with it. They only had about 5 yards of it. I used about 3 1/2 for the dress and will have to figure out how I can incorporate the other 1 1/2 yards into something for ME (and not Joan The Dress Form!):

The paper hanging from the dress is my “hangtag” identifying me as the “designer” of the dress.

Kimono-sleeve with circle-skirt dress:

Because we were running out of time for the semester, our professor said we could make the dress either out of muslin or fashion fabric (but we would get extra points if we did both). Since I already had the skirt cut out for the fit block, I decided to save fabric and take the skirt from the fit block for my dress. I was pleased with how my dress turned out, even if it was “just muslin.” We go through A LOT of muslin in these classes!

Petticoat for dress. I was planning on using the differential feed foot on my serger (yes, I finally bought an overlock machine) to gather all of the netting but it wasn’t gathering it enough. So, I had to gather it the old fashioned way–quartering and quartering it until each section to gather was only about 7-8″. The bottom tier is 160″ around (gathered to sew into the 80″ around tier). The gals on the Facebook fan page suggested I get a pleating foot for future use. I’m finding that a really good foot really makes all of the difference in the world (I LOVE my invisible zipper foot)!

I overlocked the seams sewing the tiers together to give it a more finished look and to make it less scratchy (although the lining would help protect the skin). I finished the bottom of the netting with a rolled hem. I didn’t have any woolly nylon so I just used some embroidery rayon thread that I had on hand. The shininess of the rayon looked kind of cute.