The Sewing Sphere
Art • Beauty & Fashion
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Cutting my dress

I spent the morning cutting my dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. The fabric is weird - it's slippery & drapey yet stiff, and it has some mechanical stretch because of the crinkled texture. It's a weave of shiny teal plastic strands with a cross-grain of black threads (probably poly).

It presses okay but isn't necessarily going to stay flat without help. I've decided to flatline it (instead of a drop-in lining) with another layer of itself so I can cross-stitch the seam allowances down to control bulk and keep it from being puffy along the seams.

I traced the stitchlines on the right side of the fabric, added seam allowance, cut out the pieces, and then pinned & hand-basted to the yardage. Then I cut again.

There isn't really a nap but the cross-grain definitely has a different color, so I changed the grainline on the back flounce pieces to keep everything going more or less the same direction down the dress.

Now I can sew it and see if I altered the pattern well enough not to need to recut anything.

#Butterick4731

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Studio video tour!

I spent the day priming things for paint and then I remembered to shoot a quick video. #SewingStudioBuild

00:03:06
Paint!

I started cutting all the edges while Janet was away yesterday morning. When she got back after lunch, she pulled out a roller and started filling in. I'll put a pic below in the comments. #SewingStudioBuild

00:02:15
Time-lapse floor install (part 2)

We broke for lunch and then came back with a portal ac unit plugged in to an extention cord from the house. Can't wait until they finished hooking up all the electrical and we have the mini split cooling the room for us - it was stupid humid today! #SewingStudioBuild

00:03:11
Just one more sleep 'til Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

If you're looking for something Christmasy to listen to/watch over the next few days, here's the most recent episode of my favorite podcast Blurry Creatures. It's a really fascinating (and nerdy) deep dive into the Biblical story of the Magi.

December 10, 2025

Two days after my son turned in his last paper for his bachelor's degree, I finished my shirt sewing project. Eight shirts, made to measure. Most of the fabrics are linen. Yes, regrettably you can tell exactly when I got my sewing machine repaired... but I hope these help him as he moves through his master's program and in life.

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November 28, 2025

We had a very quiet Thanksgiving, and I'm doing palate cleansers between the shirts in my shirt gift project, so I ran through the scrap pile and made myself an apron.

Aprons, IME, should be made of thicker fabrics in order to actually prevent splashes and stains from getting to your real clothes. Both of these were skirt leftover bits :)

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