I will have a good costume this year, dammit.

Dragon Con: possibly the best costume inspiration resource ever.

No more "evil Jessie" costumes, where I just draw on angry eyebrows and a fake moustache, no more "I'm a serial killer, they look just like everyone else" costumes, no more "wear my derby clothes to work" costumes.... none of that. This year I will make something decent. I mean it.

I'm determined to make myself into a weeping angel, even though I will totally be That Jerk With The Wings at the costume party we're attending this weekend. I'll just try to stand mostly in corners or plan to mop up a lot of spilled drinks. Maybe I can sew in a pocket for paper towels as a preventative measure...

I was originally planning to get a ton of makeup and find a way to dye my hair grey for the weekend without permanently having nasty grey crap in my dreads afterward. That was when I found the best resource ever: this blog is the answer to all of my problems. I found it while looking for weeping angel photos so I could get a clearer idea of my costume needs, and it totally changed the way I plan to go about this. I'm totally borrowing the nylons-for-arms idea, because Mehron makeup will cost me just as much and be a much larger pain in the rear to put on and wash off. I'll probably do the wings and hair my own way to save time, but it's good to see that the dress-with-overdress method works.

Thank goodness tonight is a craft group night. I am so jazzed to work on this and I want to start right now.

Cry for help answered. Also, a shark.

I googled "cry for help" and this was the first result. WIN.

It's been 12 hours since the dartpocalypse, and I'm still alive thanks to Maritza. As soon as she arrived in class she heard my cries for help and came right over. I suppose when a student is shaking her fist at her materials and saying "stab you and stab you and stab you," any competent instructor should know that something is amiss. Maritza is by all reports significantly more than competent. In fact, she was able to make the darts lay correctly in all of two seconds. Now I know exactly how my students feel during my photo retouching assignment when they pout at me and exclaim "you made that look EASY" before cursing me out to their friends via text message under the table. LOLZ, Maritza, I R in UR debt, 4 RLZ. OMGWTFBBQ?

She said that there's a flaw in the printing of the pattern, so at least some of that horrible bubble wasn't my fault. Still, even if I had known that it was ok to fudge the placement of the bottom dots, I wouldn't have been able to create such a smooth, clean curve without help. I'll have further opportunities to practice this when I work with the actual dress fabric, but I'm hoping to practice it again with a scrap of muslin just to be sure I understand why my curve was such a hot mess. The last thing I want to do is wreck the actual pattern piece when the materials cost more than $3 a yard.

Again with the green spot. The
lights at MassArt are weird.

I admit, half of why this dart issue is so frustrating is because it seems so simple. If the issue is really complex, at least there are numerous points at which I can run into major issues. When it's literally one step, I only have one area one can screw up.

Tonight I plan to get a better start on my work because the next steps seem reasonably easy. I'm sewing straight lines and doing techniques I've done a bunch of times before, so hopefully I won't get to another "Maritza save me!" issue, at least not immediately. Until I reach that point I can bug my mom, who has been wonderful tech support during this whole sewing adventure. Plus, they're having a taco night tonight and it's an excuse to go downstairs and have a taco.

Darts, we are done professionally.

Ghost Hunters would have you
believe that the green in this pic
is my hate made manifest. 

Thanks to my dear husbandman, I got to class two and a half hours early. This was good, because I had yet to transfer the markings to my pattern pieces and I wanted to start sewing them. I was stressed out from a full day of critiques and really wanted to chill out and have fun, and sewing thus far has been really soothing for me. Transferring the markings was no biggie, and after about fifteen minutes I was ready to start step 1: Stitch dart in "BODICE FRONT."

... and that's where I've been for the past hour and a half.

Not pictured: the specific panel I was
quoting in this paragraph.

I have no idea what on earth is wrong with me, but I can't for the life of me get this dart to do my bidding. It's supposed to form the shape of the bust, and it looks like it's a simple process. Simply fold, match up the dots, pin, and sew in place, then press down towards the waist. However, this dart is a jerk and it refuses to sit correctly. I get a weird fold between two of the dots on one side and I'm losing my mind trying to figure out why. I've looked up different dart-lining-up techniques online, watched videos and read how-to articles, and none address this problem. I checked and re-checked my marks, and they're exactly where they should be. I cut the fabric in the correct placement in relation to the grain, and the dart is SUPPOSED to be on the bias. Seriously, fabric, why you even got to do a thing?

I'm going to have to just chill and wait for Maritza to save me again. Until then I'll have to read internet articles about ways to pass the time if my rage consumes me and I act on my frustration. Was I always this tightly wound? I swear, the words "very easy" on these patterns are like those irresistable pieces of candy for the cartoon James Woods. I'm like "Ooh, very easy! Ooh, very easy!"and I keep picking them up, but then a box slams down on my head and I'm trapped. Argh.

They look like big, strong hands...

I'm not sure if I'm more angry at my large
bags or my comparatively small hands.

The up-side of taking a clothing construction class is, well, taking the class because it's an awesome class. The down-side is having to bring our sewing machine to class, because MAN this thing is cumbersome! Seriously, look at it. It's a beast.

Thankfully my husband is kind enough to help me travel to MassArt and back, because carrying this mess in the rain is poo. There's no way to carry all of this AND an umbrella! Again, though, the class is really enjoyable and so worth it. Maybe if I take more such classes I'll save for a small, cheap-o, travel sewing machine that's easier to transport.

Damn you circle skirts.

Not pictured: the rest of the night when the cat was
trying to rip the pattern paper into tiny pieces.

Someday I'll have a big enough cutting surface that I won't have to do this stuff on the floor. I fantasize about having a huge table on which to cut out large pattern pieces. It's my own damned fault for always wanting to make circle skirts. :/

Steve's "let's put the leaf into the dining room table" solution was awesome for the apron because it was small, but it isn't a great solution for this dress because it hangs off the edges too much. Also, this doesn't solve the main problems of "the cat tries to nest on my fabric" and "bending at this angle for this long hurts my back," but at least it keeps the dog from running across it when there's a horse on the television.

Someday I will have a mansion with a giant workroom. Until then, I'm thankful I don't have to do this in my old apartment. It could always be worse.

Apron in a day.

An "easy" pattern that's actually easy.

This summer a few friends and I started up a small, regular crafting group. Ideally, we get together twice monthly to craft together, and we pick a different theme each month. The theme this month is "the sea," and I made this apron out of cotton with a fish scale pattern and a swirly blue batik ruffle.

I've never made something that took me such a short time to construct. I could totally bang one of these out in a couple of hours now that I've figured out the moon language in the pattern. I still struggle with the content-rich, description-efficient language in commercial patterns, so even something this simple had its "do what now?" moments. The teacher in me gets really mad at some of these instructions and wants them to be more clear, but I recognize that adding clearer steps would require each pattern to come with a small booklet of instructions.

My waist will never again be covered with flour. My torso,
well, yeah, that's still an issue.

I guess that there's a certain satisfaction that comes with figuring out some of the word-puzzles in these instructions. I admit to getting a very Dungeons-and Dragons-trap-solving thrill when I finally understand what the more complicated lines are trying to get me to do. Ohhh I see... step 3 wants me to pin the ruffle to the pocket with right sides facing, then baste on the pocket facing directly on top with wrong sides facing, and then fold along the basting and turn the top edge inside out. I get it! Is this what getting 300xp feels like?

I'm tempted to make more. Granted, I have no real need for multiple aprons or anything, but I never feel like I've really learned something unless I can reproduce my results a few times over and work out all the kinks. Maybe I can gift a few aprons for the holidays. I totally have friends who cook and bake.

Clothing construction class continues.

I do love a circle skirt...

I'm really glad I'm taking this class. It's so great to have help from someone who really knows her stuff when I encounter pattern problems.

Right now we're learning how to work from a commercial pattern, and we're supposed to pick something that suits our skill level. Some people have really simple garments like gathered skirts or wraps. Others with more sewing experience chose more complex stuff, like collared jackets and such.

I'm trying Vogue V8615, a dress labeled as "very easy" so I don't bite off more than I can chew just yet. My challenge for this dress is setting sleeves and fitting the bust on a garment with a higher neckline. The sleeves in my failure of a Maester's robe were such a horrible trainwreck that I want to try a second attempt under the guidance of a pro. Again, while this pattern says that these sleeves are "very easy," so did the robe one, and I know better than to assume that the company's definition of "very easy" jives with mine.

Seriously bro?

So far we've cut out our pieces and we're poised to start sewing. During the cutting process I ran into my first "Maritza please save me" problem. The shoulder of the bodice pieces looked crazy screwy. On the right, the dotted lines were labeled one way, but on the left, all the measurements were down a row and I had no idea where to cut. I was told to just keep cutting along the same line and that this could be a printing error, but looking at it now I just realized that the extra numbers line up with the little triangles. HAH! Reason from madness! Thank you, dear blog, for making me think about this again later.

The bust on this dress is also different than my previous dresses. The pattern is labeled as "custom fit," and it comes with a bunch of different bodice fronts for bra sizes A-D. I'm larger than a D, but the measurements on the package for the size I cut are actually exactly my measurements, so I hope it will work out. If not, Maritza tells us she can help us learn to make adjustments.

We have tomorrow off, so I'll likely use some of that time to cut out the muslin for my first version of the dress. I still need to get fabric, but since I'm in muslin-land, I can wait and think about what exactly I want this dress to look like.