A trail of pins marches off into the distance…  What strange construction is this?

At least 8 layers of fabric, all at once.  Plus, I hadn’t noticed til now that my thread isn’t through the last tension bit.   Good to know.

Extreme closeup!

And finally, a tantalizingly large photo of project and workspace.  Peacock feathers make everything better.

I should be able to get it finished soon, but there will still be lots of tweaks to make.  But that’s why we make mockups of our New and Interesting Ideas, right?

Shh by Ye Olde Wig Shoppe

I’m working on a secret project!  It’s going a little more slowly than I want, but efficiency is hard work.

It involves lumber ties!  And saucyness.  And pattern drafting.

So far I’ve drafted the pattern, figured out the construction steps, re-drafted the pattern (yay painter’s paper from Lowes!), ironed the fabric, cut out the fabric, sewn the first couple of steps, and ironed them.

There really is a lot of not-sewing in sewing.

Now I am thwarted by my lack of bias tape.  You would not believe the amount of traffic I have to fight to get to the bias tape store.  It’s ridiculous.  If they were an all night bias tape store, I would go after dinner, but they are not.  And I don’t really blame them.  Not everyone needs bias tape at all hours of the day and night.

This weekend was a busy one, and I just couldn’t get into the groove. I’m not in hysterics over the trim, but I’m also not wearing the corset. I’m taking B’s advice and running headlong at the problem in the spirit of punk rock. I settled on one patterned ribbon, one solid ribbon, and probably some self-fabric pleated lengths.

But I got more work done on my matching hair!

Hoarding shiny things is turning out well for me at this point. I attached all sorts of things to the wool dreads. Brass coins, copper and gold beads, bone beads carved to look like skulls, jinglies. I also braided up some soft chenille yarn. I think I’m going to use the fabric scraps to make a head wrap to hide my roots when I put the hair in.

Last week I did some research on Victorian hairstyles, and there are definitely some things that are dread-able. I’ll probably try to coil some high up at the crown and then have some hanging down below.

I’m really, really proud of myself.

I’ve gotten tons more done since last I blogged. Finished flatlining…

…and moved on to assembling the back piece. Lots of hand-basting, which I actually really enjoy. Especially since I got some new basting needles which are long and sharp.

Once the side pleats are basted, the top gets pleated onto a piece of twill tape.

Then you sew it to the back pieces. The above picture is actually just the pleating, not the attaching, and it’s kind of a mess now with all the stitching, but it’ll be pretty strong. The trick is to attach it only to the interlining, not the outer fashion fabric. Tricky indeed.

Here’s how it looks after I sewed the back pieces together:

Makes a lovely chair cover!

Darts! I marked them very carefully (while watching The Corpse Bride, fun movie to sew along with) and then sewed them veeerrrrrrryyyy sllllooooowwwwlllyyyy. Started toward the middle and continued out toward the point, then broke the thread and went back from the middle in the other direction, as I learned from The YouTube Videos. This intarwebs thing is pretty cool!

So then I tried it on, first just over my shirt, then over my corset+shirt:

You can totally see the difference. Kate was absolutely right and I never questioned her, but I was very curious to see the difference for myself. The corset kind of turns that part of you into a dressform and you don’t need ease there. I sat down in it and nothing changed. Verrry interesting.

There’s even a bit of extra room! You can see I’m quite pleased with myself. I’m probably going to turn the neckline just like that for a simple lapel look.

One of the big problems is the extra fabric above the bust. As B put it, I do not have a “shelf” even wearing the corset. Here’s the solution I finally came up with when we got it all pinned for the actual fitting:

I extended the frontmost darts all the way up and over the bust to take in the extra bulk between bust and shoulder. The instructions call for dart adjustments to be made equally from the same point on all 4 darts, but there was nothing to help with the extra bulk up top. It’s still overing above my chest, but I can’t get it to lay flat and it looks kind of dramatic, which is always a plus.

ETA: I just realized that we pinned the front closed improperly – it should be 1″ stitching line against 1″ stitching line, rather than against the edge. Because of the buttons. So back to the fitting process I shall go next time around. This is all good stuff to mess up in the mockup phase, before I go nuts and shred the nice fabric. Speaking of which…

And one more before I go. Just a little teaser pic of the fabric and trim for version 1.0.