Draft-along plans

Hi everyone! I'm sorry I didn't get the poll-thing to work properly but I don't think it was too much of an issue. After all, most of you mentioned your prefered design details in the comments and it won't be a problem to discuss more than one of the options for most parts of the dress.

I think it's good to draw up a bit of a time schedule for the draft-along (although it's still flexible). Some of you mentioned being busy until mid-October and after that, the Holiday season will creep up quickly. From my point of view, it would work well to think about design during this week, fit slopers (for those who need to do that, with the help of the experienced pattern makers among us) next week and start with the actual drafting in the second half of the month. This should allow us to have finished dresses in the first weeks of November.

If that's all right for most of you, I'll try and make it into a proper schedule.

(I may just have a problem myself though: my sewing machine keeps skipping stitches. Although it does all right on a piece of scrap fabric, it's terrible in the crinkly linen I've been using for my most recent muslins. It might that it's the fabric for hell for my poor lovely sewing machine, but if it isn't... Well, I may just have to take the machine away for maintenance. Although I could take that as an opportunity to use my grandmother's hand-crank machine for this project)

I'm going to make a Flickr-pool for the draft-along (which I've never done before) and I will email everyone who signed up with the information about that.

For now, I'd like to suggest that you try and sketch up a design. Don't worry about not being good at sketching. I'm not that good myself but it can still be helpful in developing one's ideas for a garment and/or a pattern.

For quite some time, I traced shapes to make my sketches work. Fashion drawing instruction pictures for the little ladies with my previous post, but usually the picture you see here, Burdastyle's wire croqui. By now, I'm sufficiently used to the croqui's proportions that I don't really need it anymore. You can just print the croqui and put it under the sheet of paper you are drawing on or you can import it into Illustrator (or any other kind of drawing software, I guess) and put it in a layer under the one in which you are making the actual drawing.

Of course, you can still sign up for the draft-along, if you haven't yet...