Sunday, February 9, 2014

The Wedding Dress -- Silk Road Inch by Inch


Since my last post, I finished up cutting out the interlining throughout the week and yesterday marked the seam lines and grain lines on the interlining with the white wax paper that I bought. It's going to be murder on the eyes to put it all together, but I'm willing to risk that for my baby girl! (Hear that DD? So, now, on to the dupioni!

Dupioni is a highly textured, two-sided fabric made from silk. A somewhat stiff fabric, it resists wrinkling and has a beautiful sheen created when the warp (lengthwise threads) and weave are slightly different in color and sheen. One of the beauties of this fabric is that each piece of fabric is unique. The fabric has "slubs" which are thicker bits of thread in the fabric. If you found this in any other fabric, you would consider it a flaw, but not in dupioni silk.

However, when you are making a wedding dress, there are a few kinds of slubs that we don't want in the fabric. Extra thread that loops around might snag on something or pull out or places where the thread has broken--leaving a hole. So, in order to assure that I don't put one of these right in the center of a prominent pattern, I spent two hours slowly inspecting the 15 yards of fabric. Any flaw that was too big, created excess thread or a hole was marked with a pin so that I would avoid that area when laying out the pieces of the pattern. Again, another long, eye-straining project -- but one that is necessary for a good outcome.


Sometimes, a woven fabric will have salvages that are woven tighter than the fabric itself. You can see here that the salvage curls up. So that the fabric and the salvages lies flat and is easy to measure, I clipped through salvage. Then the salvage can give.

Well, that is about all for this week's blog.

Happy sewing!

No comments: