Bernina

Behold her beauty! Never again must I suffer skipped stitches or bobbin thread spaghetti! No fabric is too thick or thin! She has overlock and darning stitches, can be programmed for the needle to stop up or down, and there is an automatic threader! How did I ever sew on anything else? <3

Fascinator

Made this to match the polka dot dress and red corset. I sewed and super-glued the feathers to a thin piece of flexible foam and sewed a bobby pin to that. Nice little 30 minute project!

Polka-Dot Dress and Red Corset

I was, oddly enough, inspired to make this dress by a really awful concoction I saw on a girl walking down the Zeil in Frankfurt. Chintzy polka dot fabric, awkwardly short hem and awful cut, and a too-tall, uncomfortable-looking red vinyl belt BUT adorable red shoes! I was hooked and vowed at that moment to find the perfect pair of red shoes and recreate the look in a more flattering way.


Being a jackass; testing out the circle skirt:


I found some interfaced navy-blue/polka-dot silk chiffon and a pattern (Vogue 8470) that looked a little bit retro and had a circle skirt with a fitted bodice that would not interfere with a corset. This project ended up taking many months, not because the sewing was so intensive but because it took me ages to find the shoes (bless you, Mr. Garavani), to which the corset dupioni then had to be matched ;) I did end up making a few alterations to the pattern as well as finishing the hem with stretchy lace hem tape instead of a rolled or pressed seam, as I wanted to avoid bulk and weight to get maximum flow and flutter in the skirt movement.

Here I am wearing my dress next to my university friend Stefan Dr. Baumann at our graduation ball (to the right and left of us are the two absent members of our study group) :)

Three New Corsets

A lot of the stuff I’ll be posting soon I made a while ago, but due to minor life events like board exams and such I’m only now getting around to adding them to the blog.

I was too lazy to go to the trouble of another corset fitting, so I used the green underbust pattern and knocked out these three in no time (about 20 hours each). The black and the red corsets were essentially the same construction as the first (dupioni flatlined to a single layer of coutil with floating lining); the brocade corset was my first attempt at external bone casings.

Brocade Underbust Corset (April 2010)
I found this brocade fabric at a JoAnn’s in Texas for two dollars a yard; the binding and bone casing covers are magenta taffeta. I used pre-made boning channels and covered them with my homemade bias tape binding. Each seam is double-boned, so half the bones are actually internal. I’m pretty happy with the way these turned out, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be to get the taffeta to lay properly along the curved seams.


Here’s the inaugural run at my 31st birthday party:


Black Underbust Corset (May 2010)
Black dupioni and coutil lined with cotton. Nice wardrobe staple, can be worn with almost anything except OR scrubs!






A 3D picture for you nerds out there:



Red Underbust Corset (October 2010)
Red dupioni and coutil lined with cotton. Made this specifically to be worn over the polka-dot dress. It's late p.B. (pre-Bernina) birthdate speaks for its shoddy craftsmanship, but it seems sturdy enough despite all the dropped stitches!

First Corset!

My dad spent the majority of the two weeks I was home over Christmas doing two things: launching the Keyboard Cat application on his iPhone and making fun of me for spending my entire vacation working on this bloody corset. Truth be told, I likely spent at least as much time researching techniques, patterns, hardware, and fabrics before beginning actual construction. Admittedly, a lot of this time was spent simply drooling over some of the gorgeous creations on etsy, but there are a fair amount of great step-by-step photo tutorials to be found online as well, without which I likely wouldn't have achieved such good results.

I chose to make a waist cincher, since it's the corset pattern with the fewest number of curves to alter. To ensure a perfect fit, it's necessary to make at least one mockup out of a cheaper (yet preferably nearly as strong and unforgiving) fabric. I'm long-waisted, so I had assumed from the beginning that I'd need to lengthen the pattern (Laughing Moon Underbust). My first mockup confirmed this suspicion:
(This mockup was crafted of white denim, boned with cable ties and tightened with lacing I stole from my Pumas: basically the pinnacle of class.)

Apart from lengthening, I needed to take in the waist on the side panels to get rid of the wrinkling, as well as at the top to correct the gap disparity in the back lacing. Upon inspection, the pattern indicated I should lengthen the seams at a point above my natural waist, which would have only served to shove the corset further up to my boobs, not prevent the reverse muffin top action of the mockup. I ended up just extending the bottom of each seam by an inch to get a much nicer hip profile:
By the time I made my second mockup, I had received my hardware supplies and was able to insert the busk and steel bones for practice as well. The wrinkling was mostly gone, the length was better, the lacing gap was even... but the busk was crooked. wtf? I hadn't altered anything in the front seams to create such an angle, so I chalked it up to hurried and imprecise craftsmanship re: seam allowances, and began cutting into the real fabric.

I chose an avocado green dupioni silk for the outer layer, which was flatlined to black coutil (this is a twill-like strength fabric that can only be found at specialty stores for corsetbuilding and is retardedly expensive). Luckily, I didn't need much for this project, only about a half yard.First step: inserting the busk and assembling the side panels. So far, so good - everything looks straight. Now, onto the grommet insertion in the back panels. I had ordered some black grommets from Richard the Thread and falsely assumed that they would be as effortless to insert as the grommets I'd purchased in Frankfurt at the department store. FAIL. Apparently you need some kind of superexpensive grommet press in the US to insert grommets properly - here the ones from Prym (5-6 EUR for 40 or so) come with their own little plastic-and-metal tool that allows them to be inserted cleanly with 2 whacks of a hammer. So here I am, after all this work, now endangering the integrity of my lovely silk corset with cracked or bent grommets, some of which are half-inserted and must now be dug out using screwdriver-and plier combinations, etc. In the end, I had to use the German grommet tool to gently force the upper lip over the washer (which was being held down meticulously by my fingers), and then use my mom's old eyelet press to lock it the rest of the way down. Arrgh! I have more than a few grommets on the final product that were disfigured during my learning curve, but the lacing does a good job of covering most of it up.

Purely for simplicity's sake, I decided to use the seam allowances for my boning channels. Though I adore the look of external boning channels, and I know this method puts more stress on the seams, it was a good choice for my first attempt at corsetry. I tried out my hand at securing the bone tightly into the channel by decorative flossing along the bottom edge, and at the top sewed straight over the channels, which would be covered by the lace.
The gorgeous lace I had ordered sadly did not arrive in time to be attached to this particular corset, which is a real shame as I don't love the only black venice-y lace I was able to find in the JoAnns/Michaels/Hancocks/Hobby Lobbys around the area where my parents live. My mom lent me a hand to help speed things up and made me some awesome bias tape out of some inexpensive polyester "dupioni". Thanks to her, I was able to wear my creation on New Year's Eve!Waist Cincher Corset Specs:
outer layer: avocado dupioni
inner strength layer: black domestic coutil
lining: straw taffeta
busk: 10 inch, black
bones: 4 flat steels, 24 spiral steels
lace: crappy black window-dressing lace from Hancock Fabrics
lacing: 4 yards black grosgrain ribbon, 3/8 inch
bias tape: black fake dupioni, homemade courtesy of MomLots of love to the LiveJournal community The Merry Corsetier (or as my dad calls it, "the corset club") for their advice and amazing wealth of information as well as Mr. Seamstress, who posted a wonderful tutorial on corsetbuilding on his blog. And many thanks to Mom for sharing your experience and knowledge, making my bias tape, being my ironing slave, lacing me up, and especially letting me use your awesome machine!

I'll leave you with the favorite quotation of my Christmas break, as spoken by my mother in her Christmas phone call with her parents while describing my project:

Mom: "...so Andy's (dad) learning all kinds of words he never knew before... like BONING!"
Dad: *fires up iPhone, plays Keyboard Cat*

Two Girls, One-Up

This was a little Christmas gift for my bf, who was very pleased when he unwrapped it in front of my family at Christmas dinner (and then attempted to shove it back in the envelope before people started asking for explanations) :D



Tragically, I can't take credit for this brilliant pattern as I stole it from the Sprite Stitch forums. Even so, I'm sure it will receive the appropriate appreciation (and likely, induced retching) when framed and displayed on his desk at the video game company Chris works at!

Templeton Messenger Bag

This year, my sister got a little bit of childhood nostalgia for her Christmas (and birthday) present (and I'm sure she can elaborate on the joys of having a mere 4 days between said events). One of our favorite cartoon characters as kids was Templeton the rat from the movie Charlotte's Web (1973): a gluttonous rodent who scurries off to the fairground one night after being informed of the vast quantities of garbage and rotten food to eat there. Those unfamiliar with this scene are missing out on one of the greatest pieces of animated film evar and must immediately view the following video before being allowed to read another word on this blog:



Having been thusly inspired by this splendiferous varmint, I created a cross-stitch pattern out of his cartoon head (<3 PC Stitch) and altered this messenger bag pattern. I found the pattern to be slightly too large for my tastes, so I cut down the overall size a bit. I also 86ed the zipper on the front, as I find a shorter, sleeker flap to be more aesthetically pleasing, and added a few extra pen/phone pockets inside.

The innards:

The outer shell was constructed from a sturdy, slightly shiny cotton blend fused to heavy duty interfacing for support (2$ a yard; <3 Fabrix in SF). I used waste canvas to cross-stitch Templeton's head and shoulders onto the bag (his bloated belly would have taken longer than I could afford), and the inner lining was made from a shimmery periwinkle taffeta I had laying around that happened to match Templeton's face. Stuffed into one of the pockets was a stuffed rat, whose front paws had been sewn around a little candy bar.

Detail of Templeton's Glamour Shot:
Beautiful sis modeling the Louis Vuitton of rodent-adorned messenger bags:
A faaaair is a veeeeritable smorgasboard, orgasboard, orgasboard!

Cherry Blossom Dress

I polished off this dress in a weekend before my most recent visit to San Francisco after finding lightweight jersey on sale for 1 EUR/m. The waist panel is made of Crêpe de chine and my own cross-stitch pattern and exceeded the rest of the dress in cost and preparation time approximately fourfold. That officially makes this the cutest 5 EUR dress in all of Germany! I'm torn on the end length I chose; I did want to make it a shorter dress as I tend to wear knee-and calf-lengths (and because it's inaugural run was to be in the 95° Vegas nighttime heat, see below), but the fabric is so lightweight that it doesn't really hang or swing at this length as nicely as it did before I chopped about 8 inches off the pattern, oh well.
7/2009

Hanging Bag FAIL

This was a birthday gift for my dear (ex-) roommate Lucie. I'm pretty happy with the homemade pattern, and I guess my second try at using the cross stitch waste canvas was a success, but I'll definitely make some changes to the bag should I make it again. I'll use a sturdier material like cotton duck for the outer shell to prevent the strain wrinkles above, I won't use snaps for the folded closure (ideal would be a second (open end) zipper running around the perimeter, and I'll be a little less haphazard when inserting the zipper into taffeta (ahem)). I also don't love the handle I added to the bottom, but the fabric is so flimsy that it was necessary to support the weight of the coat when folded in half and snapped. All in all let's consider this one a FAIL.4/2009

Stuffed Animals for 29 Year Olds...

After months of Chris's begging, I finally broke down and made him his "sock otter", complete with accessories. At first I had intended to make his face out of buttons á la Otter Costume, but I ended up finding these perfect animal eyes and velvet nose in the local craft store. The whiskers (lengths of heavy fishing line poked through the fabric on either side of his nose) proved to be problematic as I have found no way to satisfactorily affix them to his perinasal region. All paws, flipperfeets and tail are (somewhat) poseable due to a large amount of wire in his innards.

The accessories are made of Fimo clay and attached to his belly by way of a velcro panel:
His little xbox controller was a bit of a challenge as well. Lucky for me I'll be able to improve my skills sculpting the boombox and camcorder accessories that have been ordered!7/2009