kluublog

ONE - Ballerina

Oh this one was a toughie! Seriously, a toughie!!!

Using the same pattern for the bodice as ONE - Goddess, I set out to re-work all the lines of the … umm.. boob cup.. lol.. breast cup for the cup inserts. It was too wide last time and too shallow. So I had to make the cup go in about 2.5cm and deeper about 1cm. (I know 1cm can make a HUGE difference.)

(Photos - pattern making on the ground, straight on to calico. My teachers would be furious, but the tailor blood in me needs to keep close to my family’s tailoring roots.)

Anyhoo.. I cut the breast cups into three sections this time, cos I realised that the last time there was four sections, and the seams made a cross sign.. and really, there’s no need for that.

(Photos - L: the BREAST cup, initial pattern, and the final pattern, pinned in calico placed on top of a BREAST cup. R: close up of intial pattern.)

The construction part of this was a little nitty gritty.

This time all the front, side and back pieces were sewn individually, like a sort of sandwich, or wedge… hard to explain.. but after I sewed that one seam, I would turn it back and then do a row of top stitching over it.. this is actually the way of construction that I was taught in complex pattern making for the construction of a corset.

(Photos - Both close ups of the BOOB part, but yeah.. it looks really shonky because I didn’t iron…  -_-” … another thing my teachers would roll their eyes for.. hehehehehehheee)

I left about .75cm next to the edge for boning. But I ran out of boning.. and I was tooo damn lazy to go to Flinders Lane to get some.. So I thought…

“The seam seems sturdy enough.. maybe I don’t need it.. Yeah!”

Wrong.

How very fucken wrong.

I shall explain later why this was a very wrong move.

Ok.. so after the sides, it was the zip at the back. Once again, wrong move! I shouldn’t have bought the open ended invisible zip. It was a shit zip. Normally invisible zips when sewn well, are actually hidden. Like I’ve mentioned in the ONE - Goddess blog post, I’m becoming a pro at these…

So obviously, my big headedness made me believe that I could probably ace this bodice too.. WRONG.

The invisible open ended zip was shit.

The teeth actually doesn’t roll backwards for you to sew up against as well as the normal invisible zips. Why, because they had to compensate for the zipper head and the zipper block at the end of the zip.

Hang on..

do you guys know what I mean by open ended?

lol… open ended zips are like the ones on your jackets, where you can zip it to the bottom completely and then take the jacket off.. normal zips are the one on your jeans, where you can only zip down to a certain length.

Anyway. So now, you can actually SEE the DAMN zip.

How fucked is that! I should’ve bought a metal zip. One, cos it looks way more cooler than that shit you see now; and Two, it would’ve been a lot more easier to use.

Ok. Zip aside.. now for the stand work. In my head I thought I would be able to use the crepe (kind of fabric) to make cool things with.. like flowers, or origami or something cool. What didn’t go through my head was that crepe is really flimsy. It’s really shit to work with in that way. AND… it’s quite heavy, so I couldn’t do cool stuff with it..

I didn’t want to do pleating, cos I already did that with the Goddess dress…

I just thought.. DANG DANG DANG DANG … no I’m not counting my cousin’s family members…(lol)

So I thought.. what if I just did some cross weaving.. would that be interesting? I ripped up about 6 - 7 x 6cm strips of crepe, and just started to cross weave in a diagonal respect. It turned out kind of bland to eye.. but I took some photos of it for research purposes and annotation, and realised that..

“Hey, it actually looks not too bad on camera”.

(Photos - All at different stages of close ups of the diagonal cross weaving and lots of pins. Oh yes.. this was the day I jabbed a thick yellow pin right down the left side about 0.2cm away from my nail, on my thumb! OH THE PAIN!)

So I finished it off, rolled down all the top and bottom parts, hand sewed the whole lot together and voila! Beautiful!

- - - - - - - -

The next bit was the bottom.

But before that, I tried on this bodice

and thought…

“DAYAAAMMMM….. Damnnn girl… you hottt!!!”

LOL.. and no, I wasn’t being vain… (too much anyway)… but it was really hot because of the breat cups and the cut of the bodice.. shows nice clevage if you know what I mean! … I mean ;P~

So for the bottom part of the ensemble, I thought.. I want to keep this simple, but showing a bit of skin. A bit of knickers showing.. I think that if someone just wore it with black micro mini shorts, it would be like..

too damn hott!!

But for the essense of PG rating, I made a skirt anyway…

It took me a fur-ricking long time to work it out though.. so in the end.. I just decided to follow the diagonal pattern of the bodice and just bring it down into the skirt.

So I ripped like another 12 x 6cm strips and started to pin diagonally, then took the end bit up, put it under 3 strips and pinned it to secure it. So after spinning my mannequin around like crazy, the result is a cross woven bulbous looking ballerina tutu.

I sewed up the waistband.. (quite poorly if you asked me)

and VOILA!

(Photo - my camera died, and I’ve been using my phone.. but my phone died as well… so there are no photos…. )

Now I just sewn on a hook.. Yeah.. I haven’t pulled my head around to doing that yet.. lol.

What peeves me though.. is when you look at the skirt itself, it looks like rags.

Yeah, a bunch of rags.

(Photo - Not very far from this chick… There’s actually a really creepy picture if you Google Image search - “A bunch of rags“)

When you put it on, it drives you made, because you have to unravel all the strips that managed to twist itself over itself, in and out of place.. and when you move the front bit, the back bit goes wrong…. sighhhhhhhhhlalalalalallaa

So yeah… this skirt is for photo shoot purposes only, and I will NOT be reproducing any of this skirt! unless it was made out of a different fabric.. and I had an apprentice to work for me. LOL

Anyways… Stay tuned for the final results, exhibited after all the PHOTO SHOOTS!! Yay!!

Oh yes… I never explained why I was VERY FUCKING WRONG about not putting in boning.

I was very fur-ricken wrong because the entire bodice was cross woven diagonally, it actually started to pull the bottom of the top up in different places, because of the character of the fabric (yeah.. a really poor and rude character if you asked me!)

So yeahhhhhhhhhhhh….. I should have put boning in, even if it was only just the front!! ><”

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