Tag: muslin

Birthday Dress – In Progress

Overdress - in progress

This is the back view of the prototype version of my 40th Birthday Dress. So far, I’m very glad that I made a prototype, and didn’t take the scissors straight to the gorgeous shot silk dupion that I’ve got waiting!

The style of the dress is exactly spot on. The open back designed to give a glimpse of the layer underneath, the ridiculous bow inspired by a 1971 Style pattern (more on this later), and a high round neck at the front, deliberately kept very plain, to show off a big necklace or a pretty scarf.

Overdress - in progress

Unfortunately, I forgot something important. (No, not the ironing. Shush.) You see those drag lines at the sides, underneath the bust? I forgot the all important part where fabric is flat but bodies are curved, and I didn’t leave quite enough breathing room at the top. Fortunately my dress form is somewhat more generously endowed than I am, so the dress does fit. But it is a bit tight, so I’ll need to re-draft the front pattern piece before I make another. (I blame the fact that my pattern drafting books are already packed for the move, so I had to make the pattern up as I went along.)

I’ve been adding a lot of “Lagenlook” inspired outfits to Pinterest lately (you can see the board here), and the point is to wear a lot of loose layers, often with plenty of frills and asymmetry thrown in for good measure. The basic silhouette of a Lagenlook outfit is fundamentally triangular. As I am also fundamentally triangular, this seems like a great look for me!

Overdress - in progress

The annoying thing is, I’m so utterly conditioned to the “right” shape for a woman being an hourglass, or at least having some semblance of waist definition, that my immediate thought on adding this belt to the dress form was, “that’s better”.

Except that it’s not better. It’s not better at all. It pretty much guarantees that I’ll have indigestion after an hour, be uncomfortable all day, and generally be distracted by my clothes instead of focussing on whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. None of which, however you look at it, can possibly be defined as “better”.

I think what I need to do now is take the belt away, make the next version of the dress much more wide and floaty, and try to step away from any and all forms of media that try to tell me that my body shape is fundamentally wrong.

(And work out how best to add the most ENORMOUS pockets to the front of the dress. Obviously.)

Natural Dyeing: Blackcurrant Surprise!

Blackcurrant Dye
silk dupion, silk paj, silk noil, bamboo, cotton muslin

Surprise, because grey really wasn’t the colour I was expecting to get from blackcurrants! I’m completely amazed by the difference between the colours on the protein-based silks, and the cellulose-based bamboo and cotton.

This one was a bit of an experiment using more of Sarah‘s leftovers – this time some blackcurrant pulp that had already been cooked. I decided to try out my new and exciting Ebay-purchased tea urn, so I tipped the blackcurrant mush into a nylon mesh laundry bag and chucked it in. As well as about 6 litres of water, I also added a litre of out-of-date blackcurrant, pear and apple juice. Well, it seemed better than just pouring it away!

Blackcurrant Dye

I left the liquid and the blackcurrants in the tea urn for about two hours – one to warm up, and one to cook the blackcurrants and release the dye. It came out a bit cloudy, because of the fruit juice, but a pretty colour!

At this point I also added some salt, as a fixing agent. The only salt I had in the cupboard included an anti-caking ingredient – E536, or potassium ferrocyanide. I suspect this has affected the colour a little bit, probably pushing it slightly towards the blue end of things.

Blackcurrant Dye

At this point I threw in the fabric, and gave it all a good stir. I left the tea urn switched on for another couple of hours which, in hindsight, was a mistake. The temperature was too hot for the silk, and it’s lost its sheen a little bit. Next time I’ll heat up the plant matter to make the dye, then switch off the urn as soon as the fabric goes in.

Blackcurrant Dye

This is what came out of the urn – exactly what I’d expected! A metre and a half of cotton muslin, in a beautiful pink. So you can imagine my surprise when I turned on the shower, began to rinse the excess dye away, and ended up with this…

Blackcurrant Dye

… a beautiful piece of delicate grey cotton, with no pink left in it whatsoever!

There’s enough here to make three scarves, one of which I will most definitely be keeping for myself. I wear a lot of grey, and I can just imagine decorating the ends of this with some smoky quartz beads for a bit of added sparkle.

It was very peculiar though, watching that beautiful pink colour just wash away. Not a disappointment, by any means, but definitely a surprise!

Onion skin dye

Onion skin dye

This post is for Sarah, who’s very kindly been saving her leftovers! Paul and I don’t eat onions (weirdly, they burn Paul’s mouth – does anyone else have this?), so Sarah’s been hanging on to her onion skins for me. This looked like a lot, but only weighed about 6g, so I only added small pieces of fabric that added up to about 8g. Judging by the colour of the dye bath, I could have added a lot more!

Onion skin dye

As with my previous experiments, I simmered the onion skins in almost-boiling water for about an hour, before removing them and adding the wet fabric. I left the fabric simmering for another hour, then switched off the heat and left the saucepan to cool.

Once again, I didn’t use any kind of mordant for this experiment. The colour of the water led me to hope for some really bright fabrics, but the actual results are a lot more muted. I’m definitely going to need to add mordants to my experiments if I want to explore the full potential of the colours available from plants.

Onion skin dye
Silk dupion, silk paj, silk noil, bamboo, cotton muslin

This time the dye came out rather patchy, and with very marked differences between the fabrics. The silks have once again taken up the colour much better than the vegetable fibres. The bamboo in particular is very pale, especially in contrast to the silk paj!

The next part of this experiment is to keep some of the fabric pieces I’ve dyed so far closed away in a book, and leave others to hang in a window. That will help me to find out how fade-resistant they are. (I suspect not at all.)

Sarah also gave me a big pot full of previously-cooked blackcurrant pulp, which is very exciting! I had intended to try solar dyeing with it, but I don’t think the sun’s come out once today. Maybe at the weekend, when it’s forecast to perk up a little! Failing that it’s back to the big cooking pot, in the hope of coming out with a lovely shade of blue.

Muslin Boot

Muslin Boots

I’ve been thinking about making boots for a little while. I finally decided to stop thinking, start sewing, and see what happened. Some minor tweaks are needed (the uppers don’t fit properly to the insoles for a start), but here is the beginning of some little boots. I have plans for more of a pull-on pixie-style thing as well, but haven’t quite got my brain around those yet.

I have terrible spacial awareness, which makes imagining objects in three dimensions very difficult for me. I have to build them, and see what happens. I am terrible at pattern drafting for exactly this reason. Also, small children can beat me at Tetris.

If I can get this pattern right, and make sure that the construction isn’t deathly complicated and time-consuming, I should be able to make these in lots of different heights without too much difficulty. She says, optimistically.