Posts Tagged ‘ruffle dress’
The result of my creative process… Hello ruffle dress!
Dress by Meg, Background by God
And just like that it’s all over!! So after much-ado, here is the result of my pains… my ruffle dress!! What do you guys think?
Personally I’m in love, and I’m determined to wear it everywhere from now on… I’m really happy that I decided to go with this colour rather than the pink. I think it would have been a little too much look!
And I”m especially glad that I put in that big effort to get it all finished quickly this week… I’d been spending so much time on the pattern, and talking about the pattern, that I was starting to hate the dress before I’d even made it! But I nipped my crazies in the bud, and now I’m sooooo happy with my little dress. The really nice thing about drafting my own pattern, was that it fits perfectly. I think everyone should sew, it’s such an amazing hobby.
The colour really isn’t coming out well… it’s a very pale sage green, but looks rather beige in the pics. Ah yes, I am no photographer!!
But seriously guys, should I make another? Or is it silly to have multiples of the same dress in your wardrobe? I think I may go for a similar shape, in a print fabric, sans ruffles?
It’s beautifully stormy today… loads of thunder, and the clouds look amazing. I have to say that Iowa has the most amazing storms I’ve experienced in my entire life, and believe me I’ve lived in a lot of places! Sometimes I walk into a store and the skies are blue, and I walk out to a thunder storm. As I’m writing this the rain has suddenly started pouring… I feel the urge to run in it… it’s freaking awesome.
Related posts:
Sketching
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My creative process- Pattern drafting part 6, skirt
Ah yes the skirt… the last piece! The pattern is almost finished!!
I want a nice big gathered waist and tonnes of fabric. Was just about to make a gigantic skirt pattern when it struck me that I was just going to end up making something incredible close to a dirndl skirt!
Sometimes it’s just best to keep it simple!!! So in just a few minutes my skirt was cut out and ready to go. YAY!!
OK so if you would like to make a dirndl too here’s a downloadable tutorial.
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My creative process- Pattern drafting part 5, Ruffles & Plackets
Oh getting so close to actual construction!! If you recall my dress is going to have a placket front with ruffles on either side.
For the plackets I took out my bodice sloper, and drafted a placket piece that was the same length as the centre front and 1 inch wide.
Then I added on seam allowance to the top and bottom and one of the sides, as the other side will be placed on folded fabric. Sorry I forgot to take a photo!!
Now for the ruffles. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted the ruffle to look like, so first I played around a bit with some scraps of pattern paper…
The first is more of a standard pleat, and the second is something like a box pleat. My original sketch had something more along the idea of the first. But after looking at it a bit, I decided to go with the box pleaty one.
I decided not to make a pattern piece for this, as I quickly realised that it would just be a really really long piece of paper. So I’m just going to cut it out on the fabric. Tisk tisk!!
Anyway, I want the ruffle to be 1.5 inches wide, so I’ll use a 3 inch wide strip (plus seam allowance) that will be folded over with the raw edges enclosed in the plackets.
The length was a little trickier to figure out. I want the top of each pleat to be 1 inch, and the inside of each pleat to be 1 inch. With no gaps, so that the enclosed fold is 1/2 inch. A cross section would show the pleat looking something like this…
I left a small gap on the bottom and top for me to include the fabric in the neck seam and waist seam. I’m a bit of a panicker, so to be safe I added on a few inches!!
I’m sure this will all make a bit more sense to you once I post up pictures of the made ruffle!!
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My creative process- Pattern drafting part 4, bodice back
Remember my slopers?
Well you may notice that my back piece has 2 darts. One on the shoulder and one at the waist. The shoulder dart is there for a closer fit to my shoulder, but for the dress I’m making I want a cleaner look. So I am going to make a back piece without the shoulder dart.
You know the drill by now right? Trace the back bodice piece…
I want to make the dart go away… which is a little more difficult that moving it. But still possible by spreading the dart intake over the neckline, shoulder and armhole. So I marked across the back as you can see above. And drew my slash lines. One right through the dart to the line, one along the line from the armhole, and one from the neckline to the line.
Then I cut along each line, and pivoted the pieces so that a small opening was in each place. Filled up the holes with more paper, and there you have it!
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My creative process- Pattern drafting part 3, bodice front
Ok so next step in my pattern drafting for this dress was creating the bodice pattern. Now luckily the bodice shape I want isn’t too dissimilar to the original bodice slopers that i drafted a while back… all I really needed to do was change the position of the bust dart in the front piece – I want a side dart as i think with the plackets and ruffle it may be a bit much having darts in the very front of the bodice as well.
First step moving the bust dart. Now here’s one of the most awesome things about bust darts. You can transfer a dart to any position around the bust point (I’m sure I don’t need to expand on what I mean by bust point, right?). That means as long as I keep the same size dart and same bust point and just pivot it around that point, I can move it anywhere. Seriously, how awesome is that????
So as always I traced a copy of my bodice front piece. Then I marked the position of my new dart.
This is soooo cool… then I cut along that line, and just pivoted the piece around the bust point until the center dart was closed and the side dart was open. Come on isn’t that cool?
Now this step is important to remember. What I’ve been showing you is a bodice block/sloper. So there are no seam allowances. Also, and most importantly, the dart you are seeing is not the dart that will be sewn. What I mean is that no dart ever touches the bust point (that would fit incorrectly and look so silly!!). They always stop a short distance away from the bust point. My preference is for the dart to end an inch or so from the bust point. So the last thing I had to do was draw the correct dart legs. I marked a point 1 inch inwards from the bust point and then redraw the dart legs so that they still originated in the same place.
A point to remember: If you want to move the bust dart of a pre-existing pattern, then you will need to locate the bust point, and cut from the dart point to the bust point. Mark your new dart position with respect to the bust point. Cut and pivot the piece so that the old dart is closed. Then re-draw the new dart point, as above. If that doesn’t make sense without pictures, I can always do a post about moving the bust dart of a pre-existing pattern at a later date.
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