I had to go look at those red dresses on the V&A site…

Am I ever glad I did!  Zémire…  ahhhh Zémire.  How do I love thee?  Let me point out the picture…

See that?  That’s Zémire before restoration.  And see that beigey thing on the dress form?  THAT is a Dior built-in foundation for the garment.  I have been trying to find more info about those for a while now.  At least to see one in a color picture and not just a sketch.   WOOHOO!  I do not envy the person who had to restore that acetate, though.  Wait, no….  I do.  Envy is exactly the word.  I would wear cellouse acetate every day for a year just to have the opportunity to work on a Dior restoration.  And for anyone that has been in Austin this summer knows what kind of misery that would be with this heat!

I just had to share with everyone.   I haven’t been this thrilled about a foundation garment discovery since I found this red corset on the Antique Corset Gallery.

Besides not managing my time well (what else is new?), I haven’t posted recently because I’m not doing much that is directly quilt related.  These days are a lot of work on the studio, work on the house and it’s summer so canning which always leads to more baking and cooking by virtue of being in the kitchen.  Don’t normal people try to avoid heating up their kitchens in the summer?  Not in our house!  How could I pass up all the scrumptious fresh local fruits?

Soooooo….  I know I said I was going to make this a quilting-only blog.  I’ve changed my mind.  It’s deanatollerton.com, afterall, not ducksoupquilts.com.  I’m allowed to be personal if I choose.

The studio is starting to really look great.  With a few months of IKEA as-is haunting, I managed to amass a substantial amount of cabinets for a very low price (think 80% off or greater) and have hacked them up to make a sewing table and computer desk.  I have an airlift for Bernie just waiting to be installed.  But I figure I’d better get the space cleared up before I make more sawdust.

Summer is certainly here in the Tollerton house.  We joined the neighborhood pool and have been a couple of times.  I really adore water aerobics/workout, especially ballet barre exercises done in the water.  I could spend hours in the pool.  R literally had to drag me out yesterday.  I like doing my own workout at my own pace much better than taking the class at the Y.  Don’t get me wrong, I needed the classes to get me going in the right direction.  But I found that the shallow water classes were still making my ankle hurt.  If I went down deep enough that I didn’t hit the bottom hard, I couldn’t hear the instructor.  And the deep water classes require the belt, which is not so much made for the large-of-middle.  I much prefer my own plan, though it is a little scary to be responsible for my own water workout.

We’ve been going to trivia night at Plucker’s on Burnet/183.  LOVE IT!  oh my bob…  the host is great and it’s seriously stiff competition.  Our team qualified for the finals but we’re still hoping to actually win one of these weeks.  The highest we’ve gotten is 2nd place.  A big thanks to the bro for getting all our booties out there in the first place and keeping it organized each week.

There’s much more I’d like to say but I fear one giant post, followed by two months of  “oh, I should blog about this…  well, um, later…”  Hopefully, you will all check back often and read new posts.  I’m excited to share my everyday life with you.  I have so many interesting things going on and things I’m learning or trying that just don’t involve quilting.  I’m glad I have the freedom to let my business putt along and spend my own time growing myself and exploring new things.

THAT is priced at $349.  I decided to break it down as if I was going to make it myself.  Please note that I zoomed in on the images on the Saks website for some of these and did not go see it in person.  I have better things to do with my time.  Like snark about tents that pretend to be dresses.

Hem — Not even a rolled hem!  Double-turned and badly so.  Totally machine.  My time: 30 min for messing with the georgette.

Sleeves — Hah!  Can they even be called that?  Two rectangles sewn into the armscye.  Maybe 30 min.

Body of the dress — very little fitting, pretty easy to cut with a few torso measurements.  About an hour to design and cut.  Maybe including the sewing since there’s just the two side seams and they’re serged.

Lining — the page says there’s a “slip lining” but since I see no evidence of one in the close-ups, I’m going to (probably wrongly) assume it’s two rectangles and not fitted at all.  Time: 5 minutes to rip and sew.

Neckline — I’l be generous and say 30 min since it has a smaller finish than the hemline.

Including picking out fabric, let’s say 3 hours.  So I would charge my customers $45 for the sewing time and $20 for design work.  I’m almost embarrassed to call that design but there is some pattern drafting in the actual size of the bodice.    Silk Baron sells their georgette for $12/yard and I’m guessing there’s about 3-3.5 yards involved there.  About the same for the lining.  So about $50 for fabric to be generous.

I think the dress is way overpriced.  For almost the same price ($365), you could have this:

A much better use of the $300-ish I don’t have to spend on dresses I don’t need.  But I’m still lusting after that violet Tadashi number.  And the damned thing about being able to sew is that I can’t justify buying expensive clothes because the little annoying miser-in-my-head always says “You can make that!”

Hey, miser-in-Deana’s-head?  Yeah, that’s more complicated than I have time for right now.

The miser says that I don’t need it, then.  Boo.  Hiss.

Ok, pack it up time…. wait, no! I meant to stitch in the ditch between the border and center as recommended to me by a previous show comment sheet. No problem! Grab the monopoly, get out the metallic needle, and stitch away until……

I stitched over the sleeve.

I feel the need to quote Aaron Karo’s Ruminations right about now.

I pulled Violet Crown from MQX and did not enter it in MQS.  I was not going to be happy with the outcome and I decided I would rather put myself a year behind schedule with wearables than have my first entry into both shows be something I wasn’t happy with or proud of.  Right now, I’m fine with the quilting and fine with the embroidery.  I’m even fine with the colors.  There’s something about the silhouette that’s bugging me.  Maybe I’ve been thinking long gowns for too long but it’s not feeling right to me with the shorter rhumba design.  I’m going to finish out the muslin in black and play with a longer “flouce” before I go any further with it.  I will do daily updates when I start in on that sometime later next week.

I hope that my bride will let me post pictures of her dress.  If you don’t know, I had a customer who was unhappy that I posted a picture of her quilt a few years ago.  I had to remove the post.  It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t want it up.  I also didn’t expect that my blog would be a big deal to her.  I actually didn’t know she read it.  I apologized profusely and felt horrid.  So, I don’t post about customer projects without permission and I try to wait until they’re done.  But I feel comfortable telling y’all a cool thing we’re doing with this one.  We took the zipper out of the back of this dress and are putting in a corset back.  Since I couldn’t find anything pre-made to insert, I had to make the tubes and loops and such myself.  I hope to post a tutorial on how I did it for the benefit of everyone who ever tries this.  I couldn’t find one myself and had to cobble together other instructions and use a little gorilla glue (j/k Honey!)

Back to beading.  Another thing I hope I get to show you guys.  It’s been a few days of work but I’m having fun with it.

I also can’t watch TV and effectively do anything by machine. #1, the longarm does not face the tv (on purpose) and #2, I stop to watch things because I either get engrossed or I can’t hear over the machine. But the Jazz music station, otoh… I forgot how much I love jazz! It’s really very motivating, too.

So, by leaving the computer off and the jazz on, I’ve managed to get a lot done. But there’s one more thing. I can’t be creative while still socializing. How weird is that?! I don’t know if it’s because I use the same part of my brain or what. It reminds me of how some artists and writers have to seclude themselves to get work done. I don’t do it on purpose but I realized the other day that I had the same problem last year while working on Scarlet and this summer while working on Charm City and Bling.

I dislike it but I feel obligated to embrace my tendency. It does produce pretty darn good results. The problem is that I then abandon the message boards, this blog, my friends, Facebook, everything. If my customers didn’t call me, I’d probably forget them, too. And THAT is a bad bad bad bad thing. I loose track of days and time. What to do, what to do?

So that you didn’t read all that for nothing, here’s a glimpse of what I’ve been working on:

Done so far on VC:
- traced off pattern, made alterations, graded up in size
- bought final fabrics
- bought muslin fabric, cut out muslin
- sewed muslin with final techniques, including all handwork and putting zipper in by hand
- drafted arches for trapunto, tested trapunto in sample
- sampled using 1/3 thick wool batting, tested with china silk backing and real dup on top
- washed out trapunto test and tested different hand-embroidery techniques and flosses
- actually managed to stop and take a picture

I find myself wanting to approach my show pieces with the attitude of:

1. practice new techniques first

2. only break one rule at a time

3. always make a full muslin

4. take my time and do it right, even if that means picking out stitches or redoing something 10 times

5. use traditional couture techniques

As I learned from my latest custom clothing piece, we learn a lot from making something once.  I want to keep that in mind as I work on this and other projects.  I guess it’s like writing.  I had a rhetoric professor who said that no good piece of writing goes through less than five drafts.  Whether it’s five or not, he has a good point and I think it’s worth carrying that theory on to art and sewing.

The premise of the story is that the male lead inherits a fantastic Parisian couture house.  Which means loads of dresses and a fashion show at the end.  I only wish it was in Technicolor!  If you’ve ever watched The Women and fast-forwarded to the fashion show (which I’m guilty of) then you must check out Roberta! It’s twice the clothes and lots of really good mugging for the camera.  I read on IMDB that they remade the story at MGM and called it Lovely To Look At (1952) with the fashions done all by Adrian.  I’m looking for it at Blockbuster or on Amazon right now!

Hate me.  You know you want to.