Carolina Herrera Dress Knock-Off Part 2

I have completed the skirt of the dress. It is basically a tapered pencil skirt with waistline darts, a center back seam and a center back seam vent for walking ease. I used the first pencil skirt pattern I came to when rooting through the patterns on my sewing table.
The dress fabric is a light to medium weight white linen, rather coarsely woven. Seam allowances on the wrong side of the garment show through to the right side. To prevent that I decided to underline the linen with Bemberg rayon in “ Camel “, a color that is very close to my skin tone. The linen and rayon were cut from the same pattern pieces. The rayon underlining was laid on the wrong side of the linen with all edges matching. It was basted to the linen, by machine, about ½ inch from the cut edges. Then the cut edges were finished with a serger. All darts and seaming was done by treating the rayon and linen as single layer of fabric.
I pinned up the hem when testing the fit of the skirt, but I will wait until it I attached to the bodice before actually completing the hem.

I wanted to talk a bit about how I did “research” on the inspiration dress. I like to have as many photos of an inspiration garment as possible; full size photos and up close photos of style details. I print the photos out on regular printer paper and study them. I often put grids over the model or garment and estimating the width of style details such as belts, collars, neck bands, etc. in proportion to the finished garment. I found this dress on the Style.com website, in the slide show of CH’s 2011 Spring RTW show. The largest photos of a garments on this site are found on the full screen view of the runway slide show. Style.com will not let you copy a photo to your laptop. But the photo can be snagged by using the Print Screen key on the keyboard, typically abbreviated as “PrtSc”. This key makes a copy of the screen, in bitmap format. The screen print can be pasted into photo editing software, word processing software, presentation software or even an email. I use Powerpoint because it allows me to crop off the headers, advertisements and other non-important stuff around the image, add text, arrows, etc. And if I plan to use the photo in a blog post, I save the PowerPoint file in a picture format(bitmap or jpeg. The best photos of designer clothes are often found on online retailer sites like Neiman Marcus and Berdorf Goodman In addition to describing the garment and listing fiber content, they have high resolution photos and a zoom function that lets you look at any part of the photo up close. These sites also prevent you from copying photos directly to you computer. To capture a detail shot, I zoom in on the part of the garment I am interested in and use the PrtSc function as described earlier.
Style.com did not show any close-ups of this dress and I really wanted to see how the trim was applied to the bodice front. I could not find the dress on any online retailer site. But I did find a Youtube video of the fashion show it was in. YouTube Video The dress starts down the runway at about 2:50 min into the video. As the model turns at the end of the runway, the photographer zooms in on the bodice. I used the Prt Screen function to capture screen shots of the bodice, though they are not great quality. I know there is other software that allows you to pull frames from video’s, but I don’t have it. Fashion shows are also a good way to see a back view of the dress as the model walk back down the runway in the background of the next dress.


Looking at the picture above, I think I know how the ruching was applied to the neckline. I have made samples of three different applications methods and will share them with you next.

Carolina Herrera Dress Knock Off - Part 1

The highlight of my weekend was fabric shopping in the NYC Fashion District. It was a spur of the moment thing. There were some extra seats on the Northern VA ASG charter bus and P. and I grabbed them. The 4 hour bus trip seemed to fly as we talked to a great group of sewing enthusiasts that included fellow bloggers Jane and Michele. I made fabric purchases at Mood, Paron's and Metro Textiles. Kashi opened up Metro as a special favor for us. He is every bit as nice, and enabling, in person as other bloggers have reported. Most of my purchases was there.

There are two contests running over at PatternReview.com that I am participating in; the Vintage Pattern and the Knock-Off contests. The Knock-Off contest ends on May 31, a month before the other one, so I set aside my vintage pattern to start on my knock-off.


It is this Carolina Herrera dress from her Spring 2011 RTW collection. I just love the use of the ruching and shaped band around the neckline. Yes, it is low cut (the first comment I hear from anyone I show it to) But it is not like there is decollete showing and I have the same lack of it as the model. I spent the early part of the month looking for similar fabrics. Based on zooming in on the photo, it looks like the main fabric is an off white silk jacquard overprinted with black floral sprays. The ruching is a sheer white fabric which is sewn over part of a solid black fabric band. The solid black band extends beyond the ruching and is covered by a strip of sheer black fabric. I had no luck finding a similar print silk and rejected the idea of overprinting or stamping a black floral motif on a jacquard silk. I decided to use this printed linen from Denver Fabrics. The print is in an olivy brown and purple, so the trim will be brown instead of black.


Duplicating the bodice design with flat pattern drafting was beyond my skills and available time. I remembered a quote by Tomoko Nakamichi, author of the Pattern Magic books. She said "When I was a student, I remember how difficult it was learning pattern making off the blackboard. I achieved the shapes I wanted by making miniatures (of the garment) out of paper, flattening them out by inserting lines and cutting them to make a pattern . It gave me a great feeling of satisfaction, but I knew that logically, it was a dubious way of going about it." Dubious for her, but it works for me. Another person who uses this technique is Shingo Sato. He calls it Transformational Reconstruction. Shingo has published a fantastic book by the same name and it comes with 2 CD's containing many of his Utube videos showing the technique.

Basically this is the technique:

1. Cut and join flat pieces of fabric to assemble into a three dimensional garment. I made a muslin of my bodice sloper with the center fronts extended as the fronts on this dress overlap.


2. Draw in the new seam lines on the three dimensional garment. I put the sloper on, and roughly drew in the style lines for the neck bands with a marker. Sorry the marker was green and hard to see in the photo below.



I took off the sloper and cleaned up the style lines. Note: the pieces do not lay flat because the sloper darts are still sewn in.






3. Take the three dimensional garment apart and flatten them, to get individual pattern pieces. I cut apart the sloper on the style lines and laid the fabric pieces flat. As you will see from the pictures below, the sloper bust darts and back shoulder darts disappeared and were incorporated into the shaping of the neck band because the edge of the band went through the points of the darts: basic dart manipulation. This technique works because the relationship between the flat pattern pieces and the three dimensional structure of the garment never changes.





I used the parts of the sloper as pattern pieces and cut the pieces out of fashion fabric. I sewed them together and was thrilled to see how good the muslin looks in the the neck and chest area.




Next Task - Working out the details of the ruching strip: the amount of gathering, shaping, and how to attach it.

Field of Flowers

After such a long blog silence you probably wondered if I ever returned from vacation. I did. Vacation was fun and relaxing, once we got to our destination. We were flying south on the day that multiple tornadoes touched down in VA and NC, which resulted in late flights and missed connections. I have now added “spent a night in an airport” to my life experiences. We arrived in FLA a day late and 200 miles from our original destination city. Sadly I have no sewing related vacation adventures to share. The rental car unexpectedly sped up or veered off course any time I pointed out a fabric store. And all three males in the car chorused in unison “Fabric! You don’t need no stinking fabric”. This is a misappropriation of a line from one of their favorite movies, Blazing Saddles. The original is “Badges! We don’t need no stinking badges”.

Key West is very laid back. We spent our time at the beach, walking around town seeing the sights, sailing, or out on boat fishing. I did not catch any fish and Dad, I seemed to have inherited your quick to get seasick gene.

After three days there we drove up through the Keys to the South Beach area of Miami. South Beach is a whole different world. We stayed in a modern condo in one for the restored Art Deco buildings that faced the beach.
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DH is great at finding wonderful vacation accommodations through VHBO (Vacation Rental Homes by Owner) sites. On a whim we Googled the condo owner’s name, which was on the lease, and discovered that Canadian hockey stars invest their money in FLA real estate. Here is a view from the balcony. The beaches were wide and the water warm.
At night there is a parade of folks, all dressed to impress. It was great people watching. Our last day we drove up north as far as Boca Raton, checking out the beaches and towns. The only sewing related thing I did on our vacation was reading. I took along the books Digital Fashion Illustration with Photoshop and Illustrator and Digital Textile Design I received Photoshop software as a Christmas present. Doctoring photos isn’t my thing but designing fabric prints and fashion illustrations really excites me.

For the past few weeks I have been working on the top and skirt from a vintage 1940 Vogue pattern.

But the computer gremlins struck the PC where I stored photos and the draft post on this project. So while my in-house geek squad moves the drives from the old PC to the new one, I'll jump to my latest project - McCall's 6286 blouse.

This is an over blouse with a wide open neckline. It is labeled “easy” but with many darts, a shaped front band, and a portrait collar, I would classify it as " medium". I always have to make shoulder alterations and I am pretty comfortable doing it to set in sleeves. But raglan sleeves like the ones on this blouse, never fit me well and intimidate me from a fitting perspective. I tried drafting raglan sleeves from my sloper and comparing them to the pattern, but the neck line of this blouse is so different that I had trouble establishing the neck point and shoulder point on the pattern for my comparison. So I decided to do a muslin of the sleeves. I wanted to do the alterations on the shoulder, where the raglan sleeve dart was located. So I slit the raglan sleeve pattern on the grain line from the dart point, creating front and back pieces. I added a seam allowance to the shoulder curve, sewed the sleeve pieces onto the bodice and pin fit the curve of the raglan sleeve from neck point to sleeve edge.

I marked the line of pins with magic marker and transferred the shape back into a one piece sleeve with shoulder dart. Success! Here you can see the difference in the original pattern and my sleeve pattern.


The fabric I used is a a medium weight cotton rayon print. The blouse flares out below the waist quite a bit.

I wore it with a belt as shown on the pattern and it looks okay. Without the belt defining the waistline, the blouse length cuts me in half. I am seriously considering shortening it by 2 inches and wearing it without the belt. It will give me a longer leg line. I thought the 10 acre field of dandelions behind our house ( Please Mr. Developer, mow this field before these flowers go to seed) was an appropriate location to photograph this floral top.

Spring Break Sewing

Long time, no post. Life has been busy lately. Stuff like odd work schedules. I am too old to work the 11:00 PM to 7 AM shift. I end up feeling horrible and getting sick. And then there were several weekends spent visiting colleges so my eldest son can make a decision on where he will go to school after his June high school graduation. In my sewing class, I gave up on an "inspired from nature" design. Instead I drafted my own pattern for this Giancarlo Ferre jacket, which is what I really wanted to do , and sewed it up. The jacket has some interesting seam lines which are hard to see in the photo. I will describe that process in a future post. It is time for our spring vacation. This year we are staying domestic, but we are going to the southernmost city in the continental USA. That would be Key West, Florida. Followed by a couple days in the South Beach area of Miami. I suspect my travel co-coordinator, DH, is trying to revisit a favorite trip we made 30 years ago. He denies it though. Do I need any new clothes for this vacation? No. But I like having an excuse to sew garments that are not what I usually sew which is work clothes. So I made the one shoulder T shirt from McCalls 6326 out of a some pink and turquoise cotton lycra knit. It is left over from the 80’s when I made leotards to wear to my aerobic dance classes. But I still like the colors in the print. McCall’s pattern have so much wearing ease, I normally drop down a size when sewing one. On this pattern I had to drop down two sizes and make SBA. I like negative wearing ease in knit garments i.e. the finished measurement of the garment is slightly smaller than my body measurements. This was especial important in keeping this top up. It is a quick to make pattern. And the Burda “Mila” dress. a free downloadable pattern from http://www.burdastyle.com. The fabric used in the dress is a piece of white and blue cotton lycra print from a FFM free bundle and a blue/white cotton oxford from Hancock’s. What I liked about this pattern is the contrast top front and placket creates a strong T shape that breaks up a large print used on the front sides. You can leave the front closures open and see the under top. The Burda free patterns can be printed out on 8.5 X 11 inch paper on your home printer and them taped together to create the full pattern. The sewing directions, on a separate download, are good. The only disappointment was that there are no layout directions for the contrasting fabric version shown in the pictures. There is a fake front under the placket which can be seen by leaving the placket unhooked at the top. The necklines of both the outer front and the inner front are to be finished by bias binding. I used the bias binding only on the outer top neckline. My fabric, being mostly white, was slightly see through so I lined the dress with a rayon fabric including the under top, This dress seemed to run large. I made a 42 which is normal for me with Burda patterns. It was reminding me of the shapeless cheap cotton house dress like those worn by some of my older female relatives when I was a child. So I converted the pleats in the back to long darts, and took in the side seams in the bust area. I still need to sew the 12 pairs of hooks and eyes to the front placket of this dress. I hope to get some photos of these two pieces on me in situ, and give you a review of the two fabric stores in Key West.

Procrastination - Burda dress 110

What have I been sewing in the last few weeks? Muslin fitting shells and collars. My sewing buddy T. and I arranged private classes with a favorite instructor on the G Street Fabrics education staff. In the most recent classes we drafted princess line patterns, both armhole and shoulder type, from our darted sloper and fine tuned the fit on multiple muslin shells. We also drafted and draped various styles of collars. The collar activity was a lot of fun and I finally understand the relationship between the shape of collar pattern pieces and the form of the sewn collar. Every drafting and fitting classes I take has resulted in self discovery about my shape and silhouette. Not all of it pleasant or encouraging. For me the alterations I have to make to deal with my asymmetry really bother me. Sometimes it takes me a couple of days and multiple phone calls to T. to come to terms with my discoveries and get the end goal in focus again: well fitted, flattering, custom sewn garments. Our next class assignment is straight from Project Runway. We are to create a design from an inspiration in nature and execute it into a finished garment. On hearing the assignment, I felt panicked, and procrastination mode kicked in. Since we are to be the ultimate model and wearer of the final garment, the instructor recommended a custom croquis for our design sketches. Croquis is French and means simply "sketch". In fashion, the term refers to a quick sketch of a figure with a loose drawing of the clothes that are being designed. This figure is typically 9 heads tall as this is the accepted proportions for fashion illustration. Here is an example.
Real people are typically 7.5 to 8 heads tall. So a custom croquis, made from my own body, would give me a better idea of how a design would look on me. The article "Discover the Best Proportions and Styles for You" in Threads Magazine June/July 2006 (#125) issue has easy to understand instructions on how to make your own croquis. Sorry, I could not find the article online. So one day, when the boys were out of the house, I followed the article's directions. I took pictures of myself in my underwear standing against a white wall, camera set up about 8 feet away on a table at waist height. I took photos of various poses, including the frontal zombie pose, which is good for evaluating your proportions against standard proportions, as well as other poses that were more “fashiony”. I cropped the excess background out of the photos, enlarged them so that my body was about 8 inches high and printed them in portrait mode on regular printer paper; I put tracing paper over the photo and traced the outlines of my body with a fine tip black marker.
Then to test my croquis, I sketched five dress styles I was considering for my next sewing project. Some looked nice, some just okay and some were no way. I’ll let you judge for yourself






I chose one of the more flattering styles to sew. I wanted to see if it would look anything like my croquis sketch. It was the gathered front dress, 110, from the March 2011 issue of Burda Style,
I really wanted to make this dress in light weight stretch linen. Of course I did not have any of that fabric in my stash. The recommended fabric is stretch silk satin. All of the stretch satins I have ever seen are fairly substantial. The fabric in the picture looks like stretch charmeuse to me. This dress really does need to be made from a very thin, soft, stretch fabric because each pattern piece is cut twice from a double layer of fashion fabric, and one set of pieces is used as the lining. And the lining is gathered at the center front and shoulders just as the garment is. The only soft, thin, woven stretch fabric I could find was a mystery fabric from the $2.97/yard table at G Street Fabrics. It was not just stretchy, it was super stretchy. I can run and do high kicks in this dress. Although it was thin, I decided to use the fashion fabric only for the lining in the armhole/neckline area. I added a horizontal seam about 3 inches below the armholes, and made the lining below the seam from nylon tricot. If I had a do over of this dress I would eliminate the gathering at the lining shoulder seam. It makes the shoulders are a bit thick.
This dress has some instructions for less common techniques. The gathering has to be pulled up to specific lengths on the individual garment pieces before sewing the seams on the center front and shoulders . The gathering on the front seam has one section over the bust that has to be gathered tightly to one finished length, but the adjoining section in the waist hip area is loosely gathered to a different length. I was having difficulty fixing the gathering threads so that the gathers stayed at the proper length. I improvised and used what I call "gathering guides". I marked the finished length of the gathers on thin strips of silk organza which I sewed to the gathered sections to hold them in place until I sewed the center front and shoulder seams.
There is a slit in the top of the center front seam that the tie goes through. There are no markings for the slit on the pattern pieces because it is marked after the gathering is done. I searched for marks indicating the location of the slit, thinking I had made a tracing error, before I figured this out.

The directions include a common Burda method for sewing the lining to the arm holes and neck opening of a sleeveless top/dress. It is often illustrated with a picture of a shoulder seam over the handle of a wooden spoon. This method can be hard to figure out from written instructions and can trigger binges of Burda bashing, even from experienced sewists. The method works great, as does a wooden spoon or wooden dowel rod as a pressing aid, if you know how to do it. An alternate method is this one shown in a great tutorial called Lining a sleeveless dress at Stichywitch's blog.

Here is the finished dress. I am in the same pose I used for the croquis. It does look remarkably similar.
That means I probably won’t be making the Vogue dress shown above, even though it uses a neat technique with wired ribbon on the front neckline that I really want to try. If my sketch is accurate, the dress will make me look like a human bowling pin. Sigh. Enough procrastination. I am off to pick a nature inspiration and come up with a garment design before Friday's class.

Vogue 1186 Issey Miyake Jacket

I purchased this Vogue Issey Miyake pattern shortly after it came out because the jacket had some interesting seaming.

You certainly can’t see the seams in the jacket on the pattern envelope. But the line drawings show them well.

I felt that if I was going to spend the time and effort to sew those curved seams, I wanted them to be visible is some way. I enlarged the line drawing and played around with my crayons. Besides the obvious color blocking options, another one I came up with was ombre coloration.

I pictured the fabric as wool where the color change was woven, not printed and there was texture or other interest in the fabric. I had no luck finding this fantasy fabric anywhere. I ordered some silk suiting and wool fabrics thinking I might ombre dye them myself, but I never got around to it. This fall I was browsing the Elliott Berman Textiles website and there was some fabric that had the ombre coloration I was looking for.
It was described as 2 Matelesse panels – made in Italy, with no info on fabric content.


It changed from a dark navy color at one end of the fabric to a bright green at the other end. I was hoping it was silk based on the price. It was on sale, but still above my $/yard comfort level. When it arrived the fabric proved to be quite interesting and unique. It was polyester, with a texture that resembled rough tree bark. The texture started out as ridges in the dark blue area and turned into cracks as they moved into the lighter bands of color. In the top green band the cracks were plentiful. The interiors of the cracks had shiny black fibers woven into them. The black fibers are actually thin flat polyester strips, very similar to the Sulky Sliver metallic thread you can buy for embroidery and embellishment. These strips float on the back of the fabric, except where they were woven into the cracks. The fabric was easy to cut and press, but no matter how thin and sharp the needles and pins I used, they often pushed the black strips through the layers to the outside of the fabric. Fortunately this did not cause a snag or pucker in the outer layer of the fabric so I finally just ignored it.


This jacket is a fair amount of work. The pattern includes the pieces for the interfacing at the sleeve hems, jacket hem, armhole and upper back, which was nice. Sewn in interfacing is recommended and that is what I used because I was unsure how well fusible interfacing would adhere to the polyester fibers. I laid out the pattern pieces so that color changed from mid tone to light on the sides of the jacket and dark to mid tone in the center of the jacket. I made the welt pockets out of a darker color than the surrounding fabric so they sort of resemble a belt as they go under the curved section. The pattern instructions are very good, describing the steps needed to complete the unique features and assembly order of this jacket. I had no trouble matching and sewing the curved seams. The only things I did not like about the instructions/pattern was the non functional sleeve vents. They were bulky when constructed as per the instructions. And instead of a button hole on the sleeve vent, the instruction have you make a line of chain stitching to look like a button hole.







I am really pleased with the finished jacket, and though the fabric is totally different than what I pictured, it did fulfill my vision. I am in the process of making a scoop neck top and wide leg pants (not from this pattern) of navy georgette to wear with the jacket. I plan to wear this outfit to a company sponsored reception and special viewing of the Pablo Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris exhibit at the VA Museum of Fine Arts.

Here is some picture of the jacket on me because I think it is important to show garments on real people, not just dress forms.