My dress for Jessie's wedding and other stuff from this past week

AnnaMarie, I'd just like to say that I really appreciate the comments. ^^ Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Or that could just be the ginormous fleece blanket. Who knows. Things have been a lot better this past week. I got a lot of work on my suit done. Lining the sleeves was a bit tricky, but I finally got the little buggers to behave. Now I just need to ease them into the arm holes. The thing about suit or jacket sleeves is that the sleeve head is actually 2-3 inches larger than the arm scythe. Now logically, that doesn't make much sense, after all, they need to match up, right? Why be annoying and frustrate the heck out of sewers internationally by making patterns where the pieces don't go together like a nice little jigsaw puzzle? Most sewers end up with puckers or gathers that just scream "home-made."

Well the answer makes sense, but it's still as annoying as all heck. Nicer coats- particularly wool ones, are eased in and the actual fabric of the sleeve head is shrunk those 2-3 inches to fit in smoothly. Very sneaky of them, and fairly time consuming to do. I got one sleeve finally steam-shrunk down to proper size and all pinned together and started to sew it up, and then.... -dum dum dum- I ran out of thread. *headdesks* I'm using a really nice, very specific shade of charcoal grey silk thread that matches the wool perfectly. I can't exactly just substitute in a generic black polyester at this point like I could have it were going to be an internal seam or something. They don't carry the particular shade I needed at Jo-Ann's (my first stop because I was also getting fabric for my dress for Jessie's wedding) and they were out of it at G-Street (my second stop, because Jo-Ann's didn't have any fabric nice enough for my dress for Jessie's wedding.) So the suit coat project is back on the shelf for a while, or at least until after I finish my dress for Jessie's wedding and the curtains for Seth's co-worker.

So my dress for the wedding! I'm really proud of myself here. I managed to get all my fabric for it for only $110. I'm lining it with a nice tafetta, and the exterior is a gorgeous rustly shantung. Polyester, of course. I would have loved to get silk, but alas. $13/yard was in my budget, $40+/yard, no so much. *sighs* I looooove silk. It's so nice to sew on. We'll see how the shantung goes. The tafetta has been pretty good so far. What's really been a pain, however, has been the 12 yards of tulle. Fur now has a friend on the list of fabrics I hate. Fur, meet Tulle, Tulle meet Fur. You're both evil. It's not that tulle is difficult to work with, per say, it's just that there's so dang much of it and it's fairly delicate so you have to be careful not to rip it accidnetly. Oops, did that once when it got caught on a needle. Thankfully it was up near the top instead of down by the hem where it might be visible. No one will be able to find my little patching job unless they decide to go looking for it.



So there it is! My past two days work. That's just the lining of the dress and the tulle should flatten out a bit once gravity does its thing overnight. I'll start cutting into the shantung tomorrow- to which the last 3ish yards of tulle will be sewn (gah) as well as the sleeves. It's nice to know that there are square necked garments, but I'm still going to adjust the neckline a bit just to be sure. Better safe than sorry, right?

Let's see, what else has been going on this week? I really love that bookshelf we got, but it didn't end up making as much of a dent in our library population as I would have liked. *sighs* To be honest, although the books in in are double stacked already, it didn't even make a significant visible difference to the den. I think we need another two. Or three.

Then I melted the carpet this week. I'd just finished ironing a seam or something and went back to my machine to sew another. Seth was sitting right next to the iron and didn't hear or see it fall either. But a couple minutes later I came back and was like. "Hey, where'd the iron go." Brilliantly enough, face down on the carpet in a puddle of polyester. Seth hadn't even smelled it melting or anything, and at least the iron didn't take any damage at all, but that corner of the carpet is toast. After much flipping out, Seth went and talked to the apartment people. Fortunately they can come up and replace just the small area that got ruined rather than making us replace the entire thing. Note to self: when I get my own atellier, it's not going to have carpet. Or it is carpet, it's going to be those squares of different colors that you can pop out and replace as necessary. Darn iron. But in spite of that, this week went pretty well. Go me.