Hooray! Another project finally realized!
I just had my birthday and when I was thinking about what I wanted to do on my day, I decided to finally see this dress into fruition. Then I could wear it to dinner that night AND to my art opening next week!
I can remember the exact day I thought of this dress, November 11th, 2011...
Then I got around to dying the fabric...just about a year later...
This was around 2 yards of a sand colored double knit cotton that was leftover from my senior fashion collection in '08.
I started at the top, writing with my chosen resist tool (pancake batter), and it shows that the longer the batter had to dry, the better the resist turned out. I couldn't just leave everything outside for days on end, so I had to commit to spraying the dye earlier than was ideal. BUT it's cool to see where the batter was still wet, it absorbed the dye and created the opposite of a resist. That's a whole nother technique in itself.
The greatest nugget of wisdom I got from dying class in college was, to go into a dye project with all your knowledge but don't have any expectations about how it will turn out. Dye is an unpredictable medium, no matter how skilled you are, and it is A LOT more fun if you just go with it!
Here I am using Skram's awesomely-huge table that's living in the upholstery room. This past week I closed the door on my sewing studio in Hillsborough and moved over here to Burlington. Jacob has been so kind as to allow me use of the upholstery room, being that it goes unused when I'm not in there working for him :)
This is a simple dress pattern, modified from a silly Vogue pattern at Hancock's. Part of me might be too proud to use another pattern and not draft my own but part of me just wanted that sleeve pattern without the work! It's still not a perfectly tweaked pattern but it's getting there. I made a dress in the winter from this that had a longer hem and long sleeves, and there I tried out a neckline that didn't thrill me, so I'm testing a new shape and finishing technique for the neck on this dress.
I'm happy the words are mostly unreadable, the idea was not to say anything but use script for its beauty. The words came from snippets out of my journal involving previous love and devolution of that love; those are in cursive. They're intermingled with lyrics from a Future Islands song, Before The Bridge; those are in caps.
Don't forget you need a left AND a right sleeve! Two lefts just won't cut it, and of course I didn't make this mistake..... I'm a professional.....
Backyard barn posing, harder than it looks!
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