Prom Time! 2018

I don't have daughters, and there's not much costume work right now.

So prom.

We have two participants in the dress queue. Both with chiffon outer skirts.

One was purchased awhile ago by F'ces, Empress of the Universe (LLC), and then finals and stuff happened, and it needs to be let out.

This photo really says it all for me. There's a girl in a dress that won't zip up, and her mom and me and pins and a tape measure. I have other photos for reference of how much and where, but do you need to see this? No. I need a couple of inches to add.

And there's not much to shop from to add. I have an almost-similar-but-not-quite lining fabric to fill where it won't show so much.

So things have to be pieced together.

I found more 'outside' chiffon lining the back bodice. Why? So I could cut it out and use it.

Thanks Prom Dress Maker!

I made myself a sandwich of chiffon and lining and some mystery fabric mesh for a stable base. 

All machine basted in place

Stitched the pieces, cut them up. I pinked to save a finishing step later

And in this light, on the table, yes you can see it clearly. If F,EotU doesn't lie down on a brightly lit table with her arm over her head (either side), we're good.

And I think it needs more pins on the inside....

Also needs more in the skirts (yes, a chiffon and two lining layers)

So we gotta find that and it 's going to show more, so I need to find some of the original lining to cut for the outermost of the two skirts. The chiffon has some pleating that I can undo enough to get an inch.

The inner skirts have a little extra kick in the back below the zip. We can use that.

That long wedge fills the gap

Inside of a dress

Outside of a dress. 

There are prettier photos of F,EotU, but none that make her look more empirical than this one. It's actually a little too big in the waist now, but she had a great time at prom and could dance and move around, so I call it good.

Love that hoomin.

You didn't think I was going to leave the dress out of it, did you? Yes, it's overexposed. Need to work on the home photo set up this summer. I have been studying all your MMMay photos for ideas. 

Dress Two is a shorter story. General Leia Huttslayer's* niece bought a dress online and it showed up with a spray of what looked like bleach dots on the skirt.

Blingle to distract and cover!

Bad little bleach dots!

Blingle to the rescue. We'll camoflage the error with sparkle.

Nice enough, but the General wants to add some rhinestones, as she does

So pro tip: if you're gluing them on chiffon, you can suspend the area over a pie plate so the glue dries on the chiffon and doesn't glue the stones to the other stuff through the chiffon.

The Niece is in there somewhere, before the rhinestones.

*her burlesque title.

Fifty Dresses Fifty - Choir Dress Wrap up

If it's Autumn, it's choir dress hemming time!

As the dresses for Northwest Girl Choir "Fresca" group age, more of them come in the fall to be hemmed and repaired. Last year 40, this year 50.

I don't have photos from the fittings, because these are 10 and 11 year old girls, and they're not my kids. 

They are really funny. Yes, these dresses are party dresses but maybe not the one you would have picked. At some point, one girl will exclaim how ugly she thinks they are. And at some point, two or three of them will be wearing them in the room at the same time, and then: They Get It. A uniform makes you look alike.

SISTERS!

 And the skirts are swooshy and you can make a lot of noise with them. And they do.

The key to fitting little girls is making sure they know you are here to make the dress work for them. "That dress looks good ON YOU", not "You look good in that dress". And if the first dress doesn't work, we can find another. 

Because every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top.

So I take in and I let out and I steal fabric from one to add to another. And I've saved all the scraps all these five years, which paid off big time this year.

Pulling long hem thread injury: I know thread cuts, but I was in a hurry. And after this, I kept the bandage on.

I hang the dresses from the ceiling of my very short room

They are two layers: poly taffeta and poly chiffon. The taffeta is a quick job; after five years I've got them all marked evenly and corectly, and I can just mark from the current hem.

The outer later  is badly cut and offgrain chiffon, which needs to be hung to be marked. Each and every one.

Now and then one of them needs to be recut on the taffeta skirt

 Hemming the taffeta is easy peasy. I trimmed a ruler to make this part swifter.

I cut off the extra bit of the plastic ruler to bring it up to the beginning of the measurement

Hem needs to be let out 3 inches: I line the ruler up on the 3" on the old hem line

I fold the hem over the ruler

And I pin with glass head pins (so I can iron over them)

 Fifty dresses and a handful of black two inch velvet ribbon belting (just try to find that stuff on short notice)

Added a sleeve gusset or two. 

I had to take one of the bodices apart and resew the neckline from the inside. That was a fun day; I tried many new techniques to undo/remove serged seaming, and have nothing definitive to report. Just give yourself too much time and some really sharp pointy snips.

This American Girl has her own custom made dress. She's a raffle prize for the winter fundraiser.

 They're done. Other stuff was sewn. Lots of fail.

 I've been better on Instagram than here this week, but here's where I get to think about stuff with words, and words are still my best friends.

This blog will be back to a regular schedule next week, and I'm revisiting the YSL exhibition, with extra camera battery.

New costumes for Giselle

I had the great good fortune to see a preview of new costumes for Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet's new 'Giselle' recently. 

https://blogpnborg.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/pnb-artistic-director-peter-boals-staging-of-giselle/

It was a great afternoon, in one of the conference rooms at the Phelps Center, surrounded by props and stage models and two of the new costumes for Giselle herself.

A combination of what thinking and research goes into a new production's costumes and scenic designs, and a WHOLE lot about polyester chiffon (perhaps I was just paying more attention to what bedevils me).  In the case of PNB's multilayered costume as shown above, the sourcing and availability for the chiffon determined what kind they would use. Even costume shops have to live in the real world like we do. And yes, the outer skirt has a ribbon sewn to the hem. Possibly nine yards of ribbon on the hem of that full round skirt.

The part that surprised me is the small number of costumes vs the larger number of dancers (2 costume sets for 4 or 5 Giselles). The practice is: most dancers in the company are about the same size, and there's a fair amount of stretch in the tech fabrics they use now. 

Bonus information: they deodorize rather than clean, and they use vodka. Picture the tiny senior wardrobe mistress going to the big box store to buy five gallons of vodka. And see her loading up the spray bottles back at the shop. Kids, don't try this at home!

new Giselle

https://youtu.be/xcs-Q_1VKtU

Principal dancers Carla Körbes and Karel Cruz in Giselle.

old Giselle

Telling the story of Giselle involves a fair amount of 'ballet mime'. Check out that link for a two page guide to story ballet's finest ghost story.

Photos for Pacific Northwest Ballet by Angela Sterling. Angela was a member of the company for some years, and has been their extremely gifted photographer for several more.

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2011 production of Giselle has been staged by PNB artistic director Peter Boal, based in part on primary sources from Paris and St. Petersburg, with the assistance of dance historians Marian Smith and Doug Fullington. In 2014, new scenery and costumes designed by Jérôme Kaplan will be added to the production.

This post has been reedited to add photos back in, I could not recreate them all. Apologies

Delivered, 70 dresses, 40 hemmed and repaired

Seven bags, ten apiece.

The hemming is done, the dresses have been taken to the client. Let's open a cold one (a caffeinated sugared up one for me) and review the mayhem.

These babies were like evil drunks, who come and wreck the party. A standard example:

Skirt goes one way, then another

 I had to hang them up on a curtain rod over the grid board to get a good gander at them.

Yes, that hem is just that wavy

After pulling the hem, I redid the two skirts. The taffeta one was well behaved and I could just measure it on the table, but the chiffon overlayer had a mind of it's own. Since the skirt was cut with a wide bias on the sides, it needed to be marked while hung up (see previous post) and then wrassled on the ironing board.

All pinned out on the ironing board

 To get the hem to lie straight required  a lot of restraining it, a lot of ironing and a fair amount of profanity.

And now they're done. Just in time for holiday gift sewing.

Hemming Naughty Chiffon

the wobbly bits get dewobbled with bigger feet (sugru to the rescue)

Hemming continues at ErnieK labs. I've had to shut the windows a few times, to keep the profanity stream from flowing down to the small children below. I gave the iron a wider stance with added Sugru feet so it would stop toppling over and adding to the general mayhem.

Dresses hanging and ready for second hem.

 The dresses have two skirts: a well behaved taffeta light grey underskirt, and a very naughty chiffon overskirt that droops and drags and throws pins out like a ... a naughty chiffon.

The taffeta is hemmed on the table, takes about five minutes.

The chiffon has to be hung up and marked. There goes an hour or more.

 I pin it to the underskirt, and use coil-less safety pins that I stab into the chiffon, eyeball for level (yes, I have a gridded cutting board on edge to assist in estimating a level), and then close when I'm satisfied. And my satisfaction level decreases as the day wears on.

No, they weren't level enough. Did I mention the skirts bias on the side seams, drooping EVEN MORE? Naughty chiffon, naughty!

I know, pining the layers together is not a great idea, but that naughty chiffon has a habit of dancing away from me otherwise.

My new love: coil-less safety pins.

Back on the ironing board.

 

Yes, I am ironing over pins

I use glassheaded pins, the longest ones I can find (1.25") and have a heavy felt wool pad under that cotton June Tailor cover. It's accurate enough, but that grid hasn't been square in years. The wool prevents a heavy steam from boiling the fabric on the table.

Because I'm hemming for tiny girls on generic length skirts, sometimes I have to turn the hems a couple times, making pleats in the middle layers. Yes, I will iron right next to my fingers. Yes, I cannot use a touch screen; I have 'dead finger' from too much shop time. I can snag chiffon with my fingertips.  Which just adds to the fun!

To repin, I have to do it on the flat (picking up the edge distorts it) so I slide one of those flexible cutting boards. I do pull it out to iron.

It did occur to me that I could use one of those Slipat baking liners and I could iron over it, but then there's that boiling fabric matter. Eh, I have enough sewing room notions and tools as it is.

So it continues. 20 done. 15 more to go. I think: I am quite sure that whatever I thought my per piece labor was, I have quite blown it into shards.