Erdem Chocolate Linen & Lace Final

This dress was the one that I liked the most and was the most satisfied with...

The stats ~
Fabric:
Chocolate Linen from my fabric collection
Poly blend blue & brown Anna Sui Lace from my fabric collection

Notions:
22" brown invisible zipper
brown rayon bemberg lining
bias binding
brown rayon hem tape

Construction ~
The lace is the design feature that attracted me to the dress and how I achieved it is detailed in this post.  After getting the lace sewn to the linen, the rest of the dress was constructed as normal.  I mean I've made this dress almost 50 times so it's autopilot sewing once the design feature has been added.

A few more photos...

Hand on the hip pose

Side view showing lace detail

Back view

Dress worn with sweater

Like I said this was the dress that I was the happiest with...probably due to the fact that it IS based upon my TNT dress pattern and even though it looks like one I made during last summer's sewcation, I think the lace is more predominant in this version. Well at least I'm consistent! *LOL*  I stick with what works for me!  I have just one more dress from the sewcation to share with you this week.

...as always more later!

Erdem Chocolate Linen & Lace Dress - Pt. 1

Fashion Week starts next week and the designers will be showing Spring 2013 but this dress from Erdum's Resort 2012 line really pushed my creative buttons.  Now to be honest, this is just one of the dresses from this line that I loved but it's the one that shouted my name the loudest.  You may yet see more interpretations from this collection...especially since Erdum is fast becoming my favorite designer!

photo courtesy of Style.com

The dress on the left is the one that I want so I collected the following fabrics from "The Collection." How kewl is that?  That I had all of this on hand!

Of course, I knew that I would start with my TNT dress pattern to make this garment. And after the twists and turns of my last dress adventure, something familiar was what I needed to sew!  This will be my autumn lace dress since lace is still quite popular heading into fall.  The linen fabric is from the Couture Line at Fabric Mart and the lace is an Anna Sui polyester blend from Emmaonesock.

To me the most important part of making this dress work is the lace overlay. Normally, I would spend days riding the bus back and forth to my job figuring out the construction order of the dress.  Since I've been on vacation for awhile now, I'm working the order out as I make the dress which, of course, has slowed down it's construction - but since that seems to be the operative word of this sewcation - slow - I'm okay with that. 

Determining how to make the lace overlay ~
My first challenge was trying to see the back of the dress.  I searched all over the internet and none of my favorite retailers even purchased this dress.  What the heck is wrong with them!?  Couldn't they see the beauty of this sheath?  So from a piece of the side view in the picture above, I determined that the back has the lace overlay too...especially after looking at the backs of quite a few of the designer's other dresses.  He typically carries the design all the way through the back. 

Making the lace overlay ~
From those observations this is what I did to make the lace overlay...

To prepare the lace fabric, I pinned all of the scallops together.

Then I determined how wide I wanted the center portion to be.  I chose 6" after measuring across the front of me.  I started out with 10" and moved down to 8", finally settling on 6 because I liked the proportion of lace and linen.

Next I laid the front dress pattern piece on top of the lace measuring 3" from each scallop to the pattern's center front line.  I wanted to insure that there was a standard 6" down the front of the dress.

For the back piece I used a 3.5" measurement to account for the back seam and vent. The lace pieces were first pinned to the linen with pins inserted every couple of inches to get a good hold.  I used my pink & raspberry pins so that I could see them through the lace.

Then I carefully and slowly machine stitched the lace scallops to the linen fabric using the smallest stitch on my sewing machine (2.2).  I wanted a lot of stitches to insure that the lace pieces were stitched down completely to the linen dress front and backs.

I hand basted the remaining portions of the lace to the linen. Finally I serged the lace and linen pieces together.  

The dress front and backs were now ready to be sewn together. Since this is my TNT dress pattern, I will sew it together like normal.  This is where I am now so the next post about this garment will be the reveal.

...as always more later!

Designer Inspired - An Erdem Interpretation

Prologue:
I was on Vogue.com last week when I spied Erdem's Pre-Fall Collection 2012 and I fell in love.  I loved his mix of prints and patterns but the dress that really caught my eye was the Jane Houndstooth & Crepe Dress from his Resort 2012 Collection.  I'd never really looked at his line before even though I'd seen it in the list of designers at style.com.  So this led to a little research.  I found out that he is a young designer working out of London.  I also went back through several of his collections on style.com to get a handle on what he liked to design and I loved his silhouettes.  I also viewed his pieces on a few RTW sites and was thrilled when I found several on net-a-porter because then you can see the garments walked on a model.

So the Jane Dress, really caught my eye...so much so that I was drooling on my keyboard at work! *LOL*  I mean this is the perfect silhouette for my body.  It is made up in my favorite fabric of the moment, Houndstooth,  and it would work for my professional work life.  My only concern is that the back of the dress is a white crepe.  That's just not happening in my life so I envisioned the dress with a few changes.


Day One - Finding the Fabric
After becoming obsessed  with this awesome dress, I came home and did something I swore I wouldn't do any time soon, I opened the fabric bins and dug through them until I found the black and white Houndstooth that I purchased from Mood and the black wool crepe that is a staple in my fabric collection.  Because like I stated before, the white back is not working for me...however...a black wool crepe back would be perfect!

I also decided to add a center back seam and an invisible zipper for ease of getting into and out of the dress.  Finally some 3/4 length sleeves from the black wool crepe will also be added to the dress so that I can wear the dress as is...without sleeves means that I would need to wear a jacket or cardigan with it...which in my opinion would detract from the dress.


Day Two - Pretreating the Fabric
By choosing to use the wool crepe I knew I would need to pretreat the fabric to prevent all of my hard work from shrinking...so since I'm impatient and I was pretreating after work, I used Pam Erny's method (which I can't locate on her blog, Off the Cuff, right now...so if someone has the link would you kindly leave it in the comments section!)  Basically Pam's method is to take a damp white towel and place it alongwith the fabric in the dryer and pretreat the fabric.  So this is what I did, white towel, fabric with serged ends in the dryer for 40 minutes.


Then I set up my ironing board with the blanket beneath it (to cover the floor) and steamed the heck out of both sides of the fabric.


The machine prep was next...making a couple of black bobbins and changing the thread on my serger and that's where I left the project for the evening.  Since I've been working on this in the evenings after work during Christmas week, the dress has taken shape slowly.  Again something unusual for me, I usually wait for the weekend to sew but I just couldn't wait for this one...it was consuming me creatively!  


Stay tuned for more on this dress...