Sewing for the wedding

I ordered some fabric for wedding clothes. I wanted something I could wear for other occasions. But, I am still waiting for that fabric. I have some fairly heavy white linen that I bought years ago. I decided to sew it up as a Walking Skirt. And I like it enough I will probably wear it on wedding day. I am sewing this on the 1891 Singer, which deserves to make a wedding dress.

I usually struggle with sewing. I tend to cut things out poorly and I don’t press them as I sew. It comes from working in a sewing factory where I picked up bad habits. But, the Treadle Quilters group on Facebook has helped me tremendously! The first thing was spray starch. I grew up in the era when you starched and ironed clothes, but I haven’t used starch in years. It makes a huge difference in cutting out fabric and in sewing it. I starched it, let it sit and ironed it with my Steam-O-Matic.

Steam-O-Matic

I cut it outside, on a freebie table that Lon plans to use in his office. It was a lot easier to cut it there than anything I’ve tried inside. I need to make myself a nice cutting table for my office. The Walking Skirt is pretty straight forward and I’ve made a few. The only tricky part is the placket. And here is where I had fun. I took out one of the binders from my puzzle box. It just turns it over once, which works okay for the edges on the plackets. It was so easy to use and I couldn’t be happier with the results.

binder

In fact, I liked it so much, I used it on the waistband too. Normally, I’d press the edge on the waistband and sew it in. I ran the edge through the binder and then sewed that to the skirt. It worked beautifully. I still need to put in hooks and eyes (and I found a neat way to do that in a 1927 sewing book I just got.) And I need to hem it. I know this skirt will be much too long. I am thinking about hemming it as is, then doing tucks around the bottom. That’s a traditional type embellishment for these skirts and would shorten it. I am really pleased with the skirt so far. It’s linen and will wrinkle, but it’s summer and it’s a traditional fiber. And I finally found a use for it. If I don’t get the fabric for the blouse pretty quick, I may improvise there too. I have the lace I want to use, but I need a light weight fabric. I also have a few other items, cut out from an earlier project, that I will work on this week. They can be used if the fabric order doesn’t show up soon. I like Denver Fabrics, but they take a long time to ship out.

I’m hoping to use the tucker and ruffler on this project. These attachments were used to make the designs of the day. They should work fine for my project.

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