OK, here’s what I realized about Project Runway this weekend. The main challenge of that show—the actual and true challenge—is trying to complete a runway-ready garment in 8-12 hours. And the incredible difficulty of this challenge is completely lost on viewers who don’t actually sew. Which, I would guess, is probably most viewers. Anyway, I came to this conclusion as I was looking at the fruits of my sewing labors from this weekend and thinking … crap. I would have NOTHING to send down the runway, unless somehow I could figure out how to clothe a model in 3 panels (3 UNCOMPLETED panels, might I add) of a six panel skirt.
Quick catchup—here’s the background on the project. I am using two patterns: Truly Victorian’s polonaise over their Parisian Trained Skirt. I decided to start with the skirt because I thought it would be “easier” and “faster”. Hah!
The Parisian Trained Skirt
I was deluded into thinking this because I’ve made the skirt before. It’s the same pattern I used for my redonkulous purple dress (RPD)—with some tweaks. There were a couple of things I didn’t like about the skirt of the RPD, and those couple of things were the two draped front aprons. There are a couple of ways to handle these aprons. You can just pleat the fabric at the side and let the aprons swag and droop. But I think this looks sloppy and it creates too much volume in front, and I’m of the mind that bustle skirts should be all “business in the front, party in the rear” if you get my drift. Anyway, what I did on the RPD was pleat the aprons all the way across, making them look more like the picture on the pattern. And then tacked the pleats down with beads for good measure. Those pleats weren’t going nowhere.
It turned out OK—the front volume was definitely tamed—but the aprons didn’t hang perfectly evenly, and I wasn’t completely satisfied. So for this go-around, I decided to rework the front three panels, doing away with the aprons entirely. I decided to go with vertical ruching over the three main panels with bands of trim going down the seams.
The broadcloth skirt panel "base" showing the stabilizing bands of twill tape. This kind of sounds like rocket science, doesn't it?
Conceptually, it’s a pretty simple rework. I cut the basic skirt pattern pieces (2 sides, one front) out of broadcloth. Then to make the ruched overlay I cut double that (4 sides, 2 fronts) out of my taffeta, adding about 4 inches in length to the ruching panels for ease. So the math works out like this: the regular pattern piece (in broadcloth) is about 48″ long, marked at 11″ intervals, with 4″ left at the bottom for rows of pleats. At each 11″ interval I run a strip of twill-tape onto which I will secure the ruched gatherings. The ruching overlay pieces are about 52″ long, marked at 12.5″ intervals with gathering stitches run .5″ above and below that.
Are you with me so far? I don’t even know why I’m going into such detail, except that a lot of my time this weekend was spent marking crap with my yardstick and drawing lines with a soapstone pencil. Oh, and also appliqueing. That’s what took a lot of time too. Remember I said I was making this dress up in 2 colors of fabric (black and blue-black), kind of simulating a plaid? Well, when I looked at my plan for the ruching, I realized I couldn’t just do the front three panels strictly in black, because there was so much blue in the rest of the dress and I needed some blue to balance it all out. So I decided to applique broad 6″ strips of blue down the front of all three panels. It sounded simple (and indeed, the execution was simple), but it ended up taking for-freaking-ever.
And this is how it turns out (looking at the front.)
So here was my process … first, I starched all my ruching overlay pieces because I needed to be able to mark on them and sew on them without having the fabric wiggle around. Then, I made 6″ strips of contrast fabric, ironing in 1/4 hems. I tacked these strips down onto the base fabric (using that indispensable Victorian sewing staple, Stitch Witchery) then sewed them on with a very narrow hem. At first I thought it might be a texturally interesting contrast to leave the fabric at this double-thickness, but then I did some test gathers and it came out looking too stiff and too poofy, so I decided to go ahead and trim away the second layer (the black layer, hidden behind the appliqued contrast stripe).
And this is how the back looks (for the three or four of you in the whole world who care.)
I had to do three of these ruching overlay panels. I ran in the gathering stitches by hand because I can’t stand machine gathers and hand gathers are more even. Also I can do my gathers with nice heavy cotton embroidery thread which means my gathering stitches won’t BREAK which they always freaking do when I run them in with the machine.
Then I added narrow hems and used safety pins to wrap up the long dangly ends of the gathering threads so that when I put these through a rinse to get out all the starch & markings, the threads won’t become incontrovertably tangled.
And now all the pieces are ready to be washed. And once that’s done, I can do the gathers, sew them onto their broadcloth backing, and call them complete.
Finally, an artist's rendition of how the ruching bands will look. I expect the gathers will be much softer and nicer once I've rinsed out the starch.
That’s three panels of a 6 panel skirt, people. And I haven’t even STARTED the 2 panels that require beaded embroidery. The good news, however, is that the sixth panel (basically the bustle and train) are going to be pretty simple. The train will have some ruching on it (I still haven’t worked out quite what I’m going to do, but it’s going to mirror the front panels in some way) but the bustle part is going to be utterly plain, as I’m not going to waste my time making it fancy when it’s just going to get covered by the “bustle” of the polonaise anyway.
And that’s your costuming update for this weekend. Only about nine weekends more to go until the Nebula Awards. For the love of God, Montressor!
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