My Fabric Addiction has run amok...

...absolutely and totally run amok...


The Fabric Mart daily sales are killin' me.  Seriously, every day they put another fabrication on sale for a great price...for that day only!  So for the last few weeks, a box a week has been arriving at my home.  One box a week with 2 to 3 pieces in it...means I'm starting to accumulate quite a bit of fabric.  Fabric that is now sitting on top of several bins because I still haven't bought the shelves to take the fabric out of the bins.  Maybe I should make that a priority, huh?


Do you see the conundrum here?  I truly don't need another piece of fabric but my off switch just isn't working because a large box of beautiful pontes and knits arrived earlier this week from Sawyer Brook...and I know another package of pontes is coming from Marcy Tilton soon.  See what I mean?  Too much coming in...too much accumulating...


So you wanna see what I got?!  *LOL*

Magnolia knit

Pinky coral ponte

Border print linen

(its a border print people, of course I bought it!)

all of these pieces are from Sawyer Brook and 

they are Subscriber Exclusives which hopefully 

will be available to the general public soon

Just want you to know that I'm not really complaining about the fabric that I've purchased recently...I just need to make a public confession every now and then to keep myself honest.


Since it's the weekend, I'll be working on The McQueen Dress.  I was going to start working on it last Monday but I needed to think through the steps on how to construct the dress.  I even briefly considered making a muslin to work out my collar issues but you know how much I hate sewing muslins.  


So since I also have some dark navy wool crepe, my black one will be my wearable muslin, if necessary...but if everything works...I'll move onto my next project.  If it doesn't and I need to redo something, I'll use the navy blue wool crepe...either way, I'll end up with a wearable dress.  

The last thing I need to do is go through the pattern collection (one more time) and find a faux welt pocket to use on the left shoulder/breast area for the dress.  I'm starting to get excited about the dress because I think I've worked out the construction process for the collar and if it works it's gonna be fabu!  Finally, it's nice to have two days to work on this dress so that I can concentrate and not rush through the process.  Hopefully I will end up with a wonderful garment at the end of the weekend.


...as always, more later!

The McQueen Interpretation - Pattern Alterations

While finishing up The Whitney Dress, I spent some time thinking about what pattern alterations I would need to make to my TNT dress pattern to make my idea work.  At first I thought I would just find a shawl collar from another pattern, trace the pattern pieces out and add it to the dress front.  Especially since I really want to preserve the zipper application in the front of the dress. 

Then Sheila left a comment about using a shawl collar on a dress that didn't work for her and it made me rethink my original idea.  It wouldn't work because the collar would be flat and it probably wouldn't lay right.  So I spent some time digging through my considerable pattern collection to find some jacket patterns with shawl collars.  I figured I could add the collar pieces to my TNT dress pattern.


By looking at the pattern pieces for the shawl collar it made me realize that I needed the under collar to be an extension of the dress front...this meant that some serious pattern alterations needed to be done to my dress front pattern.  It also meant that I would have to have a top collar facing piece for the dress.  This was turning into a much more complicated pattern alteration than I'd originally envisioned when I decided I had to have a version of this dress.

But I preservered because I really wanted the dress.  I finally found an out-of-print McCalls pattern that had a shawl collar on a coat dress that I could use to make my version of the McQueen dress.  And after looking at the pattern pieces and reading the pattern instructions, I was ready to work on the pattern alterations.

I started by making my pattern sandwich...my TNT pattern piece, then the shawl collar pattern piece and finally the pattern paper to use to trace a new pattern on top of it.  Here's what I came up with...

The back dress pattern piece didn't need any modifications except that I needed to make a new back facing piece.  All of these facing pieces will have to be added to my lining pieces...more alterations...*sigh*


Anyway, I've started working on The McQueen Dress and this is going to be a complicated kinda project...even though I didn't think it would be when I first saw the dress.  As always when making alterations to my TNT pattern, I'm worried that they won't work... 


...so stay tuned cause this is definitely going to be an adventure!