Strapless Red Minidress: What I Learned, Part II

Picked zippers are amazingly strong and surprisingly easy to install. Above is a picked zipper Susan Khalje made in my sewing class, using my duchesse satin, to teach us how to put in a hand picked zipper. (Susan's stitches are in white, my practice stitches are in black.) In a nutshell, you pin your zipper in place and then attach it to the fashion fabric with pick stitches and two strands of waxed thread. I put in my first picked zipper in this dress and it was so easy! Seriously, it didn't take much more time than a regular machine-stitched zipper. And this zipper totally blasted my erroneous belief that a picked zipper couldn't be as strong as a machine-stitched zipper. I wanted to redo part of the zipper where I thought my stitching was a little wonky and ripping out the picked stitches took three times as long as it would have taken to rip out flimsy machine stitching. Definitely install a picked zipper when you have a tight bodice like this dress and you want to be sure the zipper seams hold. (Susan Khalje has an excellent tutorial on Threads.com on picked zippers.)


Boning a bodice is no big deal. File boning under things the thought of formerly intimidated me. Once I had all the bodice sections basted together in class, Susan came over with her measuring tape and chalk and showed me where to place the boning for proper support. In all, I needed eleven pieces of 1/4-in.-wide spiral steel boning ranging in size from four inches to thirteen inches (above). At a class break I went to SIL Thread on W. 38th to buy boning, which is basically like ordering meats from a deli—"Yo, give me two 12-inch pieces, four 10-inchers, and throw in a four-inch while you're at it."

I made channels for each boning piece out of two layers of silk organza. (Above you can see a channel where I inserted the four-inch piece of boning. And look at those gnarly seams! I pinked them and then catch-stitched them all in place.) The boning was inserted and the dress tried on for fit at one of the hand-basted stages; then I took all the boning out, machine-stitched all the seams and reinserted it, stitching the channels closed. (Here's an excellent tutorial by Susan Khalje about boning.)


Be so in love with your fabric you won't break up with it. I've said this before on this blog but it bears repeating: If you are going to spend time and effort on a garment, like I've done with Annie's dress here, you have to love, love, love your fabric. If you don't, you're more likely to either pitch the project half way through and buy something retail, or work faster and sloppier because you just don't care as much. We've all done this with fabrics we've bought on sale or weren't that crazy about to begin with. I paid $50 a yard for this duchesse satin from Mood and it was worth every penny: The fabric looks expensive (note all the red carpet gowns that are made from duchesse satin) and is delightful to touch and work with (despite its propensity to curl, which Susan says is a sign of a luxurious satin). Before you buy your fabric, ask yourself if there's any danger of fabric fatigue setting in if you have to work on your project over a longer period of time than usual.


Annie's Winter Wonderland dance is tomorrow night and as I write this I just have the lining hem left to do on this dress. Dear readers, I have to warn you that this dress is short, and I mean short. (Actually the lack of length is my fault [long story], but you know Annie and her short dresses, she loves that I screwed up here and wouldn't let me alter the dress to add more length.) "You call that a dress?!" is what my own sister said when she saw it. Sigh. Photos to come...