Wedding Dress Guts

Why yes! It IS over 2 months after the wedding.  And I did, indeed, finish my wedding gown... not as on time as I would have liked, but there you have it.  When we left off, we were at 17 hours and a finished muslin.  Then came the guts... All of the underpinnings needed to really showcase the fabric and the lines and the awesome sauce nature of all of the work. I'll keep working through the dress in posts in a new bloggy bit of awesome I'm gonna tag as throwback Thursdays, looking at completed projects I neglected to blog as I was completing them.

I started from the bottom... It was like petticoat junction, except not really. I DID make one fantastic petticoat though. It was fun, especially once the colored stuff came into play. There was a red/pink layer on the bottom, then a blue layer, then 2 white outer layers. So fluffy. SO FLUFFY! You can tell in the photos that there are actually 2 pieces, the outer layers and the inner layers... It made it that much easier to get everything through the sewing machine. 

I spent about 12 hours, maybe more, building this petticoat.  It was a process to be sure, but the colors would have been difficult to duplicate in anything RTW, and I got to split the back of the petticoat and then add in even more fluff on the outer layers to help the train do its thing better.

Next came the corselette I built. The outside was a twill, and the inside was a batiste, both cotton. I used spiral steel boning in combination with steel corset boning, and I cut everything down and capped everything off. Add in soft foam cups, and we were in business! The top of the corselette was finished with shantung bias after this photo was taken to ensure that if things played peek-a-boo, it wouldn't be as obvious.

That's the quick-and-dirty version of the underpinnings saga.  My goal is to post the rest of the wedding dress construction in a couple more posts, about once a week, and get back to blogging on a more regular basis here in the near future.  I miss it! The internet sewing community is such a great place, and I have more time and sewing mojo than I have in a while so I am looking forward to blogging a bit more often.  Check in, y'all! Happy Friday!

#SewMyStash2015

I'm gonna jump in, albeit a month late... I am committed, y'all.

I haven't sewn anything yet this year but plans are brewing and I have a whole weekend ahead of me.  It's so exciting. And to think it started with Instagram! Leasa of Project Leasa posted a photo and said it was gonna be the year of sewing all the fabric she'd been saving for something special, and used the hashtag #sewmystash2015 and got an amazing response.  It balooned.  She blogged about it,  and every 3 weeks or so she has posted a challenge.  No rules except the ones you set for yourself, lots of quilty inspiration, and a really amazing group of sewists gathering to cheer each other along! There's even a widget, and a list of blogs... It's all very exciting.

Our first task was to post publicly a picture of our fabric stash, and here it is:

5 32 qt bins, 3 15 qt bins, and 2 of those dresser drawers. There's also a bigger a bigger bin full of WIP/UFOs, and these bins with projects in progress:

And the next task is not to catalog or sort or otherwise organize, but to MAKE SOMETHING. Y'all, I can get behind that one.  I have a rainy weekend and no on-calls on the horizon, so after spin class tonight I am going to cut some projects out and get to it.  Maybe even something with hearts.

Check out Leasa, and if you Instagram, follow that hashtag! You'll be inspired.