Wedding Dress - Deux

After my last post with my dress design started I had to stop for a bit due to lack of materials.  You would think that 2 yards would get you something a little more substantial but not when it's a wedding dress.  I easily breezed through those two yards of 55" wide Organza without even getting the full front draped.  I quickly ordered 11 yard bolt from Dharma Trading.  Along with that I got silk threads in natural and white.  Turns out I only needed white.  You would think a huge amount of fabric would be in a big box but not really.  It came in a bubble mailer much smaller then anticipated.  Organza is very thin and squishy! You can see how it came to me when I opened the mailer.

Since I now had the fresh organza I decided to take some of my scraps and practice the embroidery on it to find the best method of stabilizer.  It is sort of strange because people use raw silk organza as a stabilizer on it's own.  So My first test for the colors and onto the organza I did two layers on top of each other in the hoop.  It was a little tricky since they wanted to slide against each other as I was setting it into the hoop.
I'm using this gorgeous Chrysanthemum embroidery design that was actually one of the free designs from Brother right here.

Watching the embroidery machine do it's magic is incredibly mesmerizing.  The constant humming and shifting of the frame and stitches is very soothing as well.  It makes you feel like you are getting a lot of progress even though all you did was set the pattern and push the button with the color changes in the thread.  I have no idea how on earth machine embroidery was possible before these beautiful electronic machines.
 

After I was done I played with positioning against what I already had.  I also found that my bust sash is going to have to be at least half an inch winder then I had originally draped. It's ok that's why we do muslin's and mock up's before we get really hot and heavy into the patterns or sewing things together. 

 

My night didn't end here,  While my wonderful machine was doing the embroidery I was at my other machine the Innovis 80 working on pleats and the hot hot steamy un-sexy iron.  It was very tedious and hot work.  The kitties made it that much worse.  They seem to have taken after their human mom and only prefer the finest of fabrics, thus they always want to get into my silks even though there is some awesome shredded up poly organza laying on the floor for them to mess with. 

Testing out two pleat sizes i decided I needed both and also a third tier at the bottom which will be a ruffle to add some volume to the end of it. In my sketches below there will be embroidery along the top bands and for the main long dress on the strip of fabric coming down the front. The Main dress is going to be mostly white with some hints of pastels.  I think the Second dress I am going to go with really rich deep colors to make it fun.

Yes it looks like a huge mess right now but it's all the process.  I had to take a step back to look at my dress.  it's hard to judge anything when you are up close and in the middle of it.  My suggestion is always to step back across the room or to face it through a mirror.  You really have to get a different perspective

when working on a complicated or personal garment or else your eyes could deceive you into hating it or making hasty unnecessary changes.