This last week has been a little bit all over the place so you will see me jumping between different elements of the tutu depending on what I felt like working on in that moment.
The week began by cutting the lower bodice from the top fabric, sewing up the seam and pinning into place on the bodice. I also placed the patterns for the decorations to see how it looks together. Doing this I noticed two things: the fabric is really wrinkled because there is nothing to support it and I will likely have to hand sew this lower bodice to the top part of it. It was really difficult to pin around the tight curve at the front and I don’t think it will be possible to sew that by machine.
Frustrated with thinking about how to solve some of the problems on the lower bodice, I took a break from that and made a pattern for a top plate. I remember being told that it is needed to help sew the decorations flat to the tutu plate and it felt like the perfect distraction from the other things that needed doing.
It seemed too daunting to cut the netting from the pattern for the top plate so I switched again to make the orange decorations on the top plate. To keep them flat, I tacked them down to a layer of netting to help provide some support.
Cutting and tacking the orange decorations was a long and tedious process because the thread kept catching on the netting as I was trying to pull the needle through. This caused me to become a bit tired of it so I resumed what I was doing with the lower bodice shaping. I wanted to see if a backing fabric would make a difference so I cut the pattern from the same fabric used to support the bodice panels and tacked the top fabric for the left side of the bodice to it.
Tired once again of what I was doing, I started to hem one of the orange decorations. This is a process that was worse than tacking the fabric to the netting. As before, the thread kept catching on the netting and mitring the corners was a bit of a nightmare. In all, it took between half an hour to an hour just to hem this one piece. Rather unsurprisingly, I only hemmed two out of the seven total because I was getting tired. I will continue to hem the others over the course of the next week or two, in-between other elements of constructing the tutu.
To finish off the week, I returned to working on the top plate. I am short on netting so I had to separate it into four parts, with a seam up the centre and a seam on each outer edge. I’m not entirely happy with how it looks with these excess seams but it isn’t too noticeable. To complete the top plate, I sewed halfway up the back as with the layers below so that it can be worn and then the top plate was hand sewn to the basque at layer 10.
Before the end of the week, I pinned in place the other half of the lower bodice to compare side with backing fabric and the side without. The left side of the lower bodice with a backing fabric looks much flatter than the side without, I will definitely need to take apart the right side next week and sew it to match the left.