Prepping your materials

Ok let me tell you prepping your dress material is really important. and its not as easy as it seems to be.

step 1
take your material and fill a large bucket/laundry sink with a mixture of 2 cups water to 1 cup white vinegar. make sure the entire material is submerged in this mixture and leave it for a few hours.
reason: you need to get the colour to stick in your material. you would hate to make the dress and the first time you wash it it runs

step 2
wrinkle your nose, ignore that slimy feeling and transfer the material to the washing machine and wash it as regular for the material. in my case 100% cotton. then dry as normal.
reason: well obviously you want to get the vinegar out but as well you want to get all the stretching and shrinking out of the way before you cut out your pattern.

step 3
take your huge swatch of material out of the dryer and slowly and patiently iron out all the creases and wrinkles. make sure you have chairs or tables to drape the ironed end on, whats the use of ironing it if you wrinkle it right up again by putting it in a pile.
reason: any wrinkle will mean your pattern does not lie flat. which mean it will not sew right.
special note: a good iron will make your life easy, sadly my iron was ... geriatric...it sucked. this took a long time.

step 4
carefully refold it to minimize wrinkles and put it aside.

next up pattern prep

Professional Help required

Ok so the internet is not going to answer all my questions. though it has significantly helped.

things i have found that are useful online.

1)a measurement chart which sadly i can no longer find a workable link to. it had a very 70s looking model with arrows and numbers. it allowed you to measure each area that might ever possibly need and put it into an easy to reference chart.

2)http://www.sewing.org/html/guidelines.html
the pattern marking section was extremely useful. i also kept referring to here when i found words in the instructions i didn't get. like stay-stitch.

however, for all that i quickly found myself stuck on major points of the instructions. so i head off to Chapters to find a book that had everything about sewing.

Success came in the form of Sew Everything Workshop by Diana Rupp


this book was the best of the best (and it came with tonnes of free patterns for boxers, baby doll nighties, tunics, etc). it started off with an intro to your machine, talked about materials and tools. explained how to prep your material and then step by step of how to read a pattern. and then it went into techniques like how to make a gather.

now i was set. so with instructions in front of me, the laptop on my left and my new "bible" on my right i set out reading my pattern.

things were becoming clear, the foreign language was making sense. i knew how to make this dress.