my subtraction pattern and some answers

In the previous post, I promised to show you what the "pattern" for my dress looks like. And here it is (as usual, the drawing is not to scale):

As you can see, the pattern is perfectly symmetrical. 
I started with two pieces of fabric which were 140 cm wide and 3 meters long.
I used my favorite shirtwaist bodice in which all the dart width at the back has been converted into those pleats under the back yoke. On the front bodice, I combined the waist and bust darts into a single French dart. The front bodice piece is drafted to extend 2 cm beyond center front, to create an overlap for the button closure. In the subtraction pattern, left and right front bodice are placed edge tot edge (with added seam allowance, of course) and then cut. 
To make that work, I added extra width to the circle just below the waistline (not in the picture). 6 cm to be precise, the 2 cm for the overlap and 1 cm seam allowance, both times 2. 

I managed to cut out the facing pieces from the cut-out fabric around the bodice  but used an extra bit of fabric (in fact, the 40 cm bit I cut off at the bottom) for the collar and sleeves.

As you can see, I cut out the bodice pieces with sharp angles to the "side seam". In the small scale dresses, I preferred the look of that. Waist definition. 
It did mean I had to treat those points with care. I fused small circles of lightweight fusible interfacing to them, then sewed the seams and cut to the seamline. At least, that is what I did on the right side. On the left, I put in an invisible zipper. 

When I first tried the dress on, I was disappointed to find the bottom loop around my shins. I considered partially sewing it to the waistline but I didn't do that in the end. Instead, when I put the dress on, I make sure my body passes through that loop first and then through the "top" one. The top loop can't sag down because it is connected to the front waistline. So, it keeps up the other one between waist and hip. This adds to the skirt volume at the sides, which I really like.

To me, this dress is much more wearable than my first attempt (the brown-and-stripes one in this post), which was more of a "normal" subtraction cut dress. In fact, this one goes a bit against the spirit of the subtraction cutting technique. I used small scale experiments to take out the risk of experimentation and I made the bodice using normal pattern making techniques. I is what works for me though.

I think I will enjoy wearing this dress although the amount for fabric means it is not really an every day kind of thing. I would also like to continue experimenting with this technique and I think I will go on to do so in my way, with scale experiments and added normal pattern making. 

The subtraction cut dress!

A bit of a disclaimer: these pictures aren't great, to say the least. 

It turned out I didn't have time to have E take pictures of me wearing the subtraction cut dress last weekend, so I did it myself with the camera on self-timer yesterday. I used to do that a lot but I'm out of practice and out of patience with the process and it shows. 

However, I didn't want to keep you waiting for a dress I've been talking about for a while. I may try and get some better pictures next weekend and will certainly post more about the pattern and construction of the dress later this week.

The fabrics I use were chambray with a flower silhouette print and linen. Fairly stiff fabrics, which give volume where they are gathered up. 

Combined with my pattern choices, that gave the dress a silhouette which reminds me slightly of Rococo dresses worn over panniers: with volume jutting out sharply at the side waistline. 

The back is a bit plain but I don't really mind.

I'm really glad I decided to cut off those 40 cm at the bottom. the fact that legs and feet are visible at the front and side gives the dress a sense of lightness and fun that just wasn't there when it was floor-length. 

And obviously, I used a bodice shape I know and love.

Subtraction cutting again!

After my very simple dress, I decided to change gears and make something more complicated. I didn't make all those tiny dresses for nothing after all...

The design I used as a starting point is the second one from this post. In many ways, it is the simplest one I tried and probably the least typical for the technique. But that also makes it the most likely one with which to get a wearable result for what is really still just me trying it out. 

Most of the subtraction cut dresses you will find online have very simple, loose fitting sleeveless tops. I didn't really want that and I have cut the same bodice as the one I used for my recent dress. It will have buttons from the waist up and a side zipper.

Because I got the scale of the bodice wrong on the tiny dress, I didn't have quite as much length to cut holes for the skirt as it seemed in small scale. When I was marking the circles out for cutting, I realized that the bottom set on the front of the dress would end up too close to the hemline. So, I didn't cut those holes. (I'll make a proper pattern lay-out drawing when I post about the finished dress)

If you read about subtraction cutting, some people who tried it are very enthusiastic about how quick this technique is. If you read that, have a good look at the pictures. Many of those quick dresses are no more than muslins with raw edges at the armholes and neckline and over-long, unhemmed skirts spread on the floor. In my book, those are not finished dresses. 

Making it a nicely finished dress doesn't require any special skills but it does mean constantly dealing with quite a lot of fabric around the sewing machine. 

So far, I have put the bodice together but it still needs sleeves and a collar. I have also sewn up those holes.

The skirt doesn't have anywhere near the volume of that in the tiny dress (but a bit more than it seems on the dummy).

The strange thing I noticed when I tried it on was this:

The hole from the back is all the way down at my ankles. Deeply unpractical and it doesn't really do anything for the shape of the skirt. I tried connecting it to the top one at center front and that seems to work well. It creates that bustle-effect at the back which attracted me in the tiny dress (you can kind of see it in the side views but not really well enough. The lighting doesn't help. I'm sorry about that but I didn't have much time to take pictures)

The skirt is also too long. On the dummy, it almost looks like I could make that second set of holes after all but when I wore the dress, I really didn't think so. What I think I'll do is simply cut off about 40 cm at the bottom and then hem it. Unlike on the first dress I tried, the bottom edge of this one doesn't cross extra seams. That should mean I end up with a hi-low effect because the bustle hangs down to about the ankles. And the cut-off length will give me the extra fabric I need for the sleeves. 

I'll keep you posted on the progress!

Super-simple dress

Here's another one I made a couple of weeks ago. A very simple t-shirt-dress in a nice cotton jersey. 

I used the same old trick again to jazz it up a bit: I used a picture of a small bird in flight traced the lines to make a print on the dress. 

Very easy to make but I'm sure I will wear it a lot.

Wearing the new dress

This is what the wax print shirt dress looks like when I wear it! I have to repeat, I'm really out of the habit of posing for pictures and I don't have a lot of patience for it anymore. As a result, there are just two pictures and they are not the best. On the other hand, they give a better idea of the real fit than those on the dummy.
Oh, and they show how well these faded bright colours work on me.

The back is important because I made a pattern choice there which worked out really well. I've been training for rock climbing for the past years and, as a result, the muscles in my shoulders, back and upper arms are now bigger than they ever were before. In fact, I am more muscular all round and obviously that has an impact on how my clothes fit. I am thinking about re-doing my slopers but I don't think now, when a lot of normal day-to-day rhythm isn't there, is the time. 
For this dress, I used my existing sloper but chose a back design to maximize room for arm movement: It has a back yoke which is placed higher on the back than the bottom points of the shoulder darts and all the remaining width from the darts at the back (bottom part of the shoulder dart and waist darts) has been converted to deep pleats under that yoke. The pleats fall more or less on the shoulder blades. Combined with the sleeve, which is a sort of half shirt sleeve, wider and with a shallower sleeve head than the tailored sleeve you draft with a bodice sloper, this gives great ease of movement without really compromising on look and shape. I think I will use this quite a lot...

Oh, if you are interested in doing this as an alteration but you can't make out how to based on my description, let me know in the comments (or email if Blogger won't let you comment). I could do a tutorial but it is a bit of work so I would like to know it would be of use to somebody.  

New dress!

As you might expect, I didn't spend all my sewing time on substraction cutting these past weeks. Of course I also made some things I can really wear! Oh, and I made another shirt for E as well. Short-sleeved men's shirts are so much quicker to make than long-sleeved ones...

I thought this would be the most interesting item to show to you. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't fit the dummy anywhere near as well as it fits me. This dummy was given to me by a friend a few years ago. It's basically a display dummy for a shop. I was happy to have it because unlike my second-hand adjustable dummy, this one has a body I can stick pins in. Maybe it is lucky that I didn't get around to using it much for draping because its shape is at least as far off as the other one's. 

And I didn't have an opportunity to take pictures until late in the afternoon and the light isn't great...

Anyway. I do actually really like this dress. 

I bought the fabric as African wax print at the market but it really is a rather cheap copy of the real thing (which I realized before I bought it but it was quite cheap so I decided to take the risk). It's not even cotton but a bit of a mystery blend. When I bought it, the fabric was stiff like thick paper and the print was very bright. I washed it with fabric softener and this is how it came out. It has a rather nice drape but the colours ran like crazy. That was last summer. I was a bit put off by how much the fabric had faded and left it in the stash for months. This spring, when the weather was getting warmer, I had another look at it and decided those faded colours would probably work quite well on me. 

I decided to use the entire piece of fabric (African wax print, and its imitations, is usually sold in cut lengths of 6 yards. The fabric width is about 1 to 1.10 meter) for one garment. So, of course, that would be a dress. I have made lots of 1950's style dresses in the past, width past-the-knee skirts but somehow, I thought this dress would look better with a long skirt. 

So, it became a shirtwaist with a full length, half-circle skirt. It has short sleeves and a convertible collar. At the back, all the width from the darts was shifted into those deep pleats under the yoke. That allows for some glorious room for movement without compromising on shape. 

The overall effect feels a bit 1970's but that's fine with me. 

Oh, by the way, I used my favorite kind of hem for a short shirt sleeve. It's an easy trick with a mirrored hem which gives a turn-up-like look. If it is not obvious to you how to do this and you would like to know, say so in the comments and I'll make a tutorial next time I use it (which should be fairly soon, with a lot of short-sleeve-weather yet to come). 

Clean lines and twisting vines

After the bit of fun I showed you in the previous post, I went on with making a proper dress. In fact, you have already seen a bit of it: This is the dress which has the invisible zipper and the facing...

Early this year, I bought some fabric in a gorgeous African wax print. This one: 

Twisting orange vines, outlined in black, on a blue background. A great print and colours which actually suit me (I love African wax prints but usually, the colours are much to intense for my pale skin and hair).

The print is pretty big and runs along the width of the fabric. So, I quickly decided I would have to cut whatever I was going to make, on the crossgrain. But unlike with the other wax print I used before, this one could be a dress on its own (because those colours could work for me). 

At first, I was thinking about a simple skirt. Then, a dress with a full skirt. But when I was really getting serious about cutting into this lovely fabric, I realized it would probably work best as a very simple sheath dress. 

Oddly enough, I have never made one of those before. I always felt I somehow didn't have the right kind of curves for the style. Now, I just decided to give it a go.

I drafted the pattern based on my normal sloper and sewed up a muslin. One with a zipper, so I could have a good look at the all-over fit.

When I tried that on, it was clearly too large. My normal sloper has a certain amount of ease added to it which works really well for a lot of garments. Not for this kind of dress though. I took out about 1 to 1.5 cm at the side seams.

I ended up with a pattern with vertical waist darts, two at the back, one at the front (on pattern pieces, so the dress has double that amount), a center back seam with the zipper in it, bust darts from the side seam, fairly wide but high neckline, slightly narrowed shoulders (compared to a sloper which was made to have sleeves added to it) and a back vent (which doesn't look right in these pictures but that is because I was sitting before and E doesn't notice "details" like that...).

I normally only do very close fits on strapless dresses but for this style, it seemed like the only way to go (the first muslin just looked frumpy).

I took great care with cutting the pieces from the fabric. I wanted the centers of the clusters of vines along center front and center back. This meant I could not cut in the most economical way. Especially getting part of the back seam to match up was a bit of challenge.

When I first tried it on, I was very happy with my decision to go for darts rather than princess seams or anything like that. Yes, the darts interrupt the print but somehow that hardly attracts any attention. And that big print is just SO lovely...

I finished the neckline and armholes with an all-in-one facing in simple black cotton. The treatment of the bottom of the dress is a bit different. Normally, I would hem, often by hand to make the stitches invisible. In this case I didn't. When fabrics like this one are put to use by African ladies, the selvedge is often left on display, usually at the hemline. I kind of like the way that looks here and decided to do the same.

Because African wax print fabric is nearly always sold in pieces of 6 yards (yes yards. We always use metric here in the Netherlands but this fabric is sold in yards) I still have quite a bit left so I'm sure I will use it again.

The retro wrap Dress

Ok, it took me a long time to finally take pictures of the things I have sewn over the past weeks. For some reason, I didn't feel like posing for a couple of weeks. At last, I bit the bullet. Yesterday, I did my hair, even applied make-up and made good use of E's presence and willingness to take pictures. So, now I have four more things to show you (each in its own post). At least, I think it was four... No, five.

I'm going in chronological order. So, first up is this wrap dress:

It is made from a nice but not-so-stretchy dark blue cotton jersey. The fabric has been in my stash for quite a while and I used to have very ambitious plans for it. Violent-like draping. Something along that line.
In the end, I didn't try that. It would be a lot of work for a not very practical garment and I might even find out that the fabric was actually a bit to bulky for gathered bits (as jersey so often is).
Instead, the fairly large amount of fabric (close to 4 meters, I think) would be perfect for another idea I had in mind of a while. This dress. 

By the way, I know my decision to take pictures on our tiny balcony has resulted in some lighting issues. There is backlight in all images which doesn't show the details very well. That is why I am including these. They are from the end of the shoot when E was goofing around and making me laugh but they show a bit more detail on the dress:

The design of this dress is based on a top I made years ago:

The original blog post is here. I made it using this tutorial from Studio Faro (another Pattern Puzzle), which was in turn based on a vintage pattern illustration.
Even back then, in 2014, I realized how easy it would be to turn the top into a dress by adding a circle skirt to it. However, I thought the blouse-y body wouldn't look very goor with a full skirt. 

After that, I didn't think about it for years. Until some point in May when I put on the top again. This time, I started pulling at it to try and find a way to take it in a bit. This top is made from a rather unusual pattern shape so adjusting the size is not straightforward. But I found an easy way to do it.

This is the pattern as draft it according to the instructions on the well-suited blog (I believe it's supposed to be a size 38, which is a bit too big for me). My top was made exactly like this, just with a fairly short and narrow strap because I didn't have a lot of fabric. When constructed, the top has a center back seam at the bottom half of your back and one long horizontal seam which runs over the bottom ends of your shoulder blades and along the sleeves (unlike for most pattern puzzles, the construction of this top is also shown in the Studio Faro post). It is that last seam which holds the key to adjusting the fit! 

I ended up cutting the pattern like you can see here, along the solid red lines. I tried it out by pinning my existing top and ended up taking almost 10 cm  from both the top and bottom piece, tapering to nothing in sleeve seams. This results in a more fitted bodice and less draping at the neckline (without losing all of it). In my opinion, much more flattering.
Of course, the fit of a this thing would always depend on your shape and size, so if you are interested in making something like this, I would heartily recommend making the top first and going from there. I believe there is also a post about drafting it in a bigger size somewhere on the same blog, but I'm not sure (that might also be for the other retro wrap top).

Anyway, for this version I made a waistband which is 8 cm wide and was made from separate pieces for the in- and outside. This was needed so it would have seams at the top and bottom to encase both bodice and skirt. I also cut its length in two pieces to allow for a hole at the side to pull one of the ties through. And I made the ties in different lengths so the right place to tie the dress would be at the end of the front overlap, not at the back. 
The skirt is simply a full circle, cut without seams (the fabric was wide enough to make that possible). Because this is a true wrap dress, part of the fullness of the skirt goes into creating a safe amount of overlap.

It's a bit too warm to wear this dress now, but I am pretty happy with it and I'm sure I will wear it a lot. I'm not sure it still looks very 1950's. The top does, but something about the lines of the skirt in this flow-y fabric makes me think of the 1970's. Not that I care. It suits me, that's much more important.    

Well suited

A few weeks ago, with the last classes taught and just some meetings left to wrap up the school year, I was looking for another sewing project. And still, I felt a bit tired and didn't quite feel up to doing everything myself (something which I usually enjoy...).

After my little adventure with the Thai fisherman pants it was time for something more girly. A dress. So, I had a look at all the pretty dresses from Studio Faro's pattern puzzles (I still miss the weekly Pattern Puzzle, even though the timing was a bit unpractical for me. It was like a regular meeting for pattern making geeks!) and quickly decided to go for one in jersey.
That still left a couple of options but I decided to go with this one:

It is from 2014 and can, for that reason, only be found on the old blog. But fortunately, it's still there!  
For those of you who are not familiar with Studio Faro: it is (as far as I can tell from the blog posts and site info) a one-woman company in Australia specializing in both pattern making for fashion companies and pattern making lessons for fashion students and enthusiastic amateurs. For years, she also ran the "Pattern Puzzle" on the Studio Faro Facebook page. This meant that she would post a picture of random pattern pieces and readers would guess what it was. I found that quite addictive, and I know I'm not the only one...

And if that wasn't enough, in the week following the Pattern Puzzle, there would be a blog post showing the design and describing how to create the pattern from your own slopers. There is just one catch: these tend to be designs, ideas, experiments, not tried-and-tested projects. So there is no guarantee each one will work out well. 
If, like me, you are used to drafting your own patterns, that will be familiar territory though.

Anyway, I went to work on the Jersey Ruche Dress. An interesting design idea in which you slash and spread the front and back pieces of the fitted dress block for jersey fabrics in such a way that you can line them up to form one big pattern piece. There will just be a line of gathering where a side seam would have been (the smooth side has the one remaining side seam). And there is a set-in sleeve at the side with the shoulder gathers and a kind of raglan sleeve at the other side.
This time, I didn't try to be clever and drafted the pattern according to the instructions. I just had to fudge a bit with the main piece because my jersey block probably has a bigger waist-to-hip ratio that usual. And I planned for short sleeves instead of long ones.

Choosing a fabric wasn't that easy. I wanted to use something from my stash (should always be possible, it is huge). The pattern pieces were less big than I had feared (some of these pattern puzzles and really terrible when it comes to fabric economy, again because they are just design ideas) but not every fabric would work for a design like this. It would have to have the right hand, be soft and drape well. That means cotton was out. Cotton jerseys are lovely but they tend to have a bit of 'body', a stiffness which would not work here. And the fabric had to be light and thin enough for all those gathers. Some viscose/rayon jerseys, although they drape wonderfully, can be really heavy and get bulky when gathered. Stretch and recovery were less important in this case (although don't want to use one of those knits which only every keep on growing, ever again)
But I had something in my stash which was certainly thin enough, but maybe a bit too thin. A sort of marled grey/green jersey. A mystery blend containing (probably among other things) viscose and a tiny bit of wool.   

This fabric works really well with those gathers but it is a bit transparant. I picked those pictures in which it doesn't really show. It did in some of those I didn't choose. So, I guess this will be an indoor dress (I often like to slip on a comfortable dress when I come home from work, so having one which is only suitable for that purpose is fine with me). I thought about making a full lining but that felt like more trouble than this dress was worth. 
I did make a sort of all-in-one facing which holds the neckline and armscyes together. I decided on that after I had sewn the outside pieces. The neckline moved around in a way I didn't like: the gathers at front and back crept up and there was also kind of issue with the raglan sleeve (I forgot what that was). I made the facing for those pieces without the gathers and stabilized it with some very light-weight knit interfacing. Sewing that in helped. 

I still wonder if it would have been better to cut the neckline a little lower, or to put in denser gathering. I don't know.
Oh, and I used the rolled hem setting on my serger to hem the dress. That is often the easiest options on very flared-out hemlines, especially in thin fabrics. I had to be careful with the tension: It still had to be stretchy but I didn't want one of those "lettuce edge" hems (which are just serged rolled hems on very stretched-out edges). The result is OK but it looks like the edge of stitching is pulling a little bit if the light falls on it in a certain way. 

All in all, it's not one of my best dresses but certainly not one of the worst either. And it was fun to make, the right kind of project for the time in which I made it.   

a super-simple dress

So, things got busy in the past two months. The end of the school year brought extra events in my teaching job, good weather meant more climbing trips and then, there was my ongoing effort to get better at route setting in the climbing hall. So, not a lot of time for sewing. I did make some simple things but didn't really find the time and/or motivation to take picture and write blog posts. Yet, that is. 
The school year has ended now so I have a bit more time on my hands and I have some projects I would rather like to show off and talk about.
I've decided to try and post about all the things I made over the this past couple of months although I can't promise long, in-depth posts and great photoshoots about all of them.

I'll start out with this super-simple dress (with E's help, I took pictures of four items today which will be in three blog posts. I didn't really have a lot time or feel like posing for pictures so I hope you can put up with fairly bad hair and the occasional weird facial expression).

It's just my favorite go-to self-drafted jersey top with the cut-on cap sleeves (it would be wrong to call it is a T-shirt because it is not in the shape of the letter T...) with a circle skirt attached to it. I shortened the top to about 10 cm below the waistline (12 at the back) and tightened the waistline a little. I cut the skirt to size to attach to that line. No zipper needed. 

Super quick to make, super easy to wear.
The top is made from black viscose/rayon jersey, the skirt from a fairly lightweight, but a bit stiff cotton. I like the way the checks on the skirt shift in angle because I just cut a full circle from this fabric an used it like that. 

In fact, making a dress like this is so simple I am very surprised I haven't really seen any others on sewing blogs and Facebook groups. Just take a tried-and-tested t-shirt pattern, find a point on you body where it is not at its smallest and where the start of a full skirt would be flattering and add a full or half circle skirt...

...and a dress

And here is the last item of my early February sewing spree: It's a dress!
To be precise, it is a dress made from the same fabric I used waaaaaay back, for my last dress of 2010. I still have that dress although it is looking rather worn by now. It is looking worn for all the right reasons: I've loved it ever since I made it and I have worn it a lot. 

The fabric is a peculiar material: I would definitely describe it as 'mystery fiber' with quite a bit of synthetic in it but there is no static cling. There is a serious bit of stretch but it is along the length of the bolt (which is why now, like back in 2010, I have cut my pattern pieces on the cross grain). The base of the fabric is a beige-ish knit with black corduroy-like ridges on the good side. It is quite stiff and has basically no drape at all. The wrong side is sort of scratchy but in a nice way.

For a long time, I thought I would just re-make that first dress but somehow I never did... Maybe it just didn't feel quite right to do that.
I'm glad I finally made another dress from this material (and I think I even have enough of it left for another one...) 

Because the fabric is nearly back, it hard to show the details in a picture. So, I thought it might be better to include a technical drawing. 

The new dress has long raglan sleeves, a fitted bodice with princess seams and kick pleats at the back and a casual sweater-style short zipper and collar.

And I have to say it is just as comfortable as the old dress. 

Now with pictures

I hope you've all had a good time over the holidays. These final weeks of the year are usually busy but also mean some time off work.
That last reason finally allowed me to have E take pictures of me in that dress I wrote about earlier.

As I mentioned before, it is very revealing unless you stand at just the right angle. This is the right angle but you can still see my bra. And that slit in the skirt does go all the way up to the waist. I guess I'll use it as a robe in summer. 

I liked the shape though. Fitted from the waist down, curving up to those fairly wide cut-on sleeves. It reminded me of this beautiful vintage dress I've kept on a Pinterest board for a while now.

So, I decided to try and make another dress using the basic shape of the kimono twist design. You know, without the twist...
I even had the perfect fabric: a double knit, blue rib on the right side, plain black on the inside. I'm not sure about the fiber content but there's no static cling so I don't think it is polyester or acryl. It is firm and stable enough for the fitted parts and yet has enough drape for those sleeves. 

Basically, I just used the back piece from the kimono twist dress for the front and back of this one (with an adjusted front neckline, of course). And to give myself room to walk without that big slit, I cut the dress with a center back seam and inserted a godet there. I'm glad to report it works well.

I'm really pleased with this dress: It was very easy to make, I love the look and it is very comfortable. It's a shame its success is so dependent on the fabric or I would recommend it to everyone and make many more myself...