Garden Tennis Slashed Bikini

Garden Tennis Bikini, Ghost Intimates

My newest pair of bikini bottoms! The mint jersey is from a Miu Miu dress, the floral silk is a Dior nightgown, and the lining in that awesome neon tennis-ball yellow is newly sourced. You can't really tell from this photo, but when you put these undies on, the slashes in the Dior silk spread to reveal a neon surprise! Hm, I just realized this is not the best photo because I took it before I sewed the Ghost Intimates label in, but you get the idea.

Briefs in Progress

I haven't really said anything about my lingerie project in the works, but here's a sneak peak of the pair I was working on today. (After I got out of bed at 1ish...)

Unfortunately, I ran out of elastic just as I thought I'd be able to finish before I went to bed—that would've been exciting—but who knew each of my thighs required 18 inches of elastic to go around? That was a bit of a shocker. I mean, it just SOUNDS like a lot; I guess I'd never thought about my body parts in terms of circumference, for things other than the usual bust, waist, and hips. Happy surprise of the day though: the elastic turned out to be entirely dyeable! Fancy that.

WIP: Tonia Shorts

How do I work in a mess like this?  Least charming photo ever.

I used the Tonia shorts pattern from burdastyle.com.  It cost me $3 !  Yes, that's still very little to pay for a full pair of shorts, but I'd gotten so used to their patterns being free that this was a very big shock.  Paying for it made me feel more like I had to actually finish the shorts, though, since I get really excited about new projects, but have a really hard time finishing them.

So far, I've modified them a LOT.  A lot of guesswork was involved, and very little formal pattern drafting (as you may remember, I only took Draping last year), but I carried out my adjustments based on what I felt like common sense called for...and hopefully I'll prove myself right with the fit.  If you compare these with the original pattern, you'll see that these are the low-rise, short-shorts version.  With a fly that may or may not be constructed differently than the directions had instructed.  (Has anyone else found that burdastyle patterns are written really weirdly?)

But the best part of these shorts is that they will be scalloped at the bottom of the leg!  Yes! Inspired by the current Chloe collection (though it seems that they use a scalloped trim) and encouraged even further by a little how-to handout our Copying Couture teacher gave us on the techniques of Pierre Cardin, these shorts will be SO cute.  If all goes well.

Naked Pillows No More

I finally clothed my pillows!

So a while back, I made my sister send me [from New York!] her un-used pillow fillers, and since then, naked pillows have been sitting around my place, their weird unfinished seams bugging me. And the fabric I've also had for ages; definitely more than a year. But finally, they're done, and I must say it was quite easy, except that for something so easy and logical, it took quite a while to calculate everything so that every opening slit, etc. was in the right place in the end. I'm all for making things yourself, obviously, but I hate when things LOOK "homemade," you know? They should look professional!

I've only made those 2 so far, and I don't think I'm going to use the entire box of pillows that C sent me, but I think I still have a few to make.

P.S. It doesn't look like it's on purlsoho.com anymore, but it says on the selvedge that this fabric is by Tina Givens for Westminster, collection name "Zazu." Flowers, chandeliers, and pink! Hmm...I don't think it's quite girly enough...

So my machine got fixed and I think all it was was that the machine was dirty and dusty inside...aaaaaand I was threading it wrong. And that's why I was having problems. I didn't think I was THAT off though—I just wasn't maintaining tension, but apparently it was at a very crucial point or something. Anyways, problem solved, I learned something, and I got some stuff done over the weekend.

First, cutting on the bias. I need a rotary cutter. I hate cutting fabric, especially slippery stuff. On the bias. Ugh, you do not know how annoyed I was after hours and hours of trying to get the pattern on a perfectly true bias. I was really excited at first because since my silk is polka dotted, on the bias, the dots line up in a grid, giving me lots of vertical and horizontal reference points. I wanted it perfect, so I assumed that if I pinned the center front of the pattern to one column of dots, symmetrical points on either side of the center line would automatically line up on the same row. Except they didn't. Or more like WOULDn't. After a lot of whining, I made the educated guess that while I was pinning the center line, I'd probably stretched the fabric unevenly, so... ANYways, I ended up pinning every 2x2inch grid corner to every 7th dot. And pinned exactly on that corner, exactly on that dot. As you can see here:


And then these are the sewn front and back:


I'm not going to go into the details (no one cares!) but the darts sewn and the lace is all arranged and appliqued. My front neckline is going to be different from the pattern because she said I could do whatever I wanted design-wise, as long as it involved more work and not less. See how mine has that slight V in the front? Well the original pattern is flat across, which I hate. I always feel like I'm being strangled by necklines like that, even if they're nowhere near my neck. So...that's it for now. So far so good.

Project CamiSOLE

I'd been pronouncing it cami-ZAHL. Who knows why.

So this is basically the same pattern (style) we're using for our project. I didn't pick it; we had no choice. Our fabric has to be a silk or other slippery woven, not a knit like in this picture. [Just to be clear, I do NOT like this Josie Natori cami I'm using as my example here. In the voice of Michael Kors, "slutty slutty slutty!" Or maybe just cheap-looking, even if it is selling for 125 at Neiman Marcus. Sorry, beep beep., I know you love you some animal print!]

I might be sounding a little blah about the pattern, but that's really only because I have doubts about how flattering it's going to be on me, because it's so body-dependent with the bias cut. I'd prefer a nice blouson [probably another word I can't say in real life] style to temper my pear shape. Like this:

Eco-Boudoir at figleaves.com

But I don't want you to think I'm being a Debbie Downer about something that has barely even started; I actually have great hopes for my little cami. I found a pretty royal-purple-blue silk at Britex and a cream French lace from Satin Moon to match the color of the tiny polka dots. (Another girl from class got the same lace, said one of the sisters at the store, so we'll see who that was on Monday. Either we'll be great friends or rivals for life.) I'd actually been having daydreams of a fragile black Chantilly eyelash lace with my silk, with the fringe at the edge of the neckline, but apparently it's hard to find as a trim; it's usually sold as a fabric. And the one they had at Satin Moon was 100$ a yard. Plus, one of the sisters warned me away from using black with my "blue" silk. ::sniffle:: But without further ado, these were my choices, and I think the combination looks promising:

Classy, not trashy!

P.S. Oh wow, I was googling to see if Chantilly lace was really what I thought it was, and this I.D. Sarrieri is exactly what I was thinking of (though it turns out that "Chantilly" and "eyelash" are two separate concepts):

Fall Semester '08

So the new term's started, and after a summer of doing basically nothing, it's been a bit of an effort getting used to this new routine. No more sleeping without an alarm. Which means no more sleeping in until anywhere from 2 to 5. But it's kind of nice, joining the real world again, being awake when most other people are.

Figure Drawing's my security blanket so far. It's round two of a class I took last spring, so the same teachers, classroom, etc. help me feel normal. Or safe. And confident. I need some new charcoal sticks, though. Utrecht just opened a new branch in my neighborhood (but I'm still going to drive) so that should be fun to explore.

Fashion Draping looks like it's going to be fun. On Thursday, we got to pick the mannequins that we'd be using all term, so I was like this is a big deal--if I get a crappy one, I'm stuck making clothes in the wrong size till the end of the year! So I'm trying not to run and push everyone out of my way, everyone else also trying not to look like they're That Competitive Student, but you knOw we all had one eye trying to figure out which mannequin came in our own sizes. Or at least I did. I found one that looked pretty small with a "2" stamped on her neck, so I was happy. Well, I was going to ask the teacher if there were any zeros in the bunch, but then I looked at my mannequin, and her waist was tiny! Apparently with "vanity sizing" going on now, the size 2 I thought I knew is really like...a size 8 mannequin.


Anyways, we draped experimentally--only having lightly researched Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret on our own--with 2 sheets of 1-and-a-half yards of muslin. I was a little nervous but secretly also really excited for what could happen, like what I could end up making. And in the end I was pretty happy with it. I know it looks a little crazy, but I would seriously wear this. I ran out of room on the paper, but that's kind of where the dress ends off anyways. Can you believe: this is 36 square yards of fabric! That is a lot for a 2-foot-long dress.

And Lingerie Design & Construction. So far it looks like this might be more sewing techniques specific to fabrics often used in lingerie (think slippery and stretchy) than design, but we'll see. I mean I would enjoy that by itself anyways, since this is all new to me; I've sewn before, I would even say that I sew kind of regularly, but I have no idea how my standards compare with those of professionals. Our first project is a camisole [I'm so used to saying "cami" instead, I just realized I've been pronouncing this word wrong!], and I'll have pictures of my fabric and lace selections up later. I think the teacher might not like me, though. My theory is that my auto-pilot "polite" voice actually ends up sounding whiny.