11: Dress Making Magic With Momola

Illustration How To Make a Dress With Momola @smartigraphicdesign

The talents and tradition of clothes-making herald back through generations and I'm the blunt end of a long line of gifted seamstresses. Baby outfits, theater costumes, prom dresses - thanks to Momola, I've had them all. So it wasn't much of a stretch to query her on how to break apart a dress to make another. Here's a little peek behind that curtain on that adventure back in August 2021 (dear me, 2 years ago!):

Left to Right: Illustration of Find A Dress You Love. Photo of Pattern Breakdown. Illustration of Carbon Copy It ©smartigraphicdesign

Thrift-hunting in Paris, I found a polka-dotted swing dress with a full skirt perfect for swing dancing. I wore it out until the threads were busting all over. And instead of trying to mend it, I brought it home to Momola and asked if we could make a copy.

Normally, you can just take your shirt/pants/skirt and trace it inside-out on a long sheet of paper. (Check @withwendy for her YouTube video on cloning clothes if this excites you.)⁠ But my dress was made of complicated godets, or triangles that form the skirt. Too complicated for this technique. So, I split apart the seams and copied the cut pieces on a sheet of paper. And then I cut out carbon copies of each piece.

Left to Right: Illustration of Serger Photograph of cutting the pattern. Illustration of Ironing The Dress ©smartigraphicdesign

Serger (which is not a sewing machine, but rather a joining machine?) is the next phase. Dress parts are pinned together first and then passed through the needle but instead of tying the fabric together, the thread merely binds parts so they don't shift. Undoing the threading is suprisingly easy. And once the serger marries everything, it can go through the sewing machine for the final clean sewing line. Or at least, that's what I can make out of that phase. It seemed rather frivolous to me. But Momola was the boss, so I did it.

And then it was a lot of back and forth - serging and sewing. Every now and again, the folds of the material needed to be ironed to make sure that they lay flat to get the cleanest sewing lines. A safety cloth goes between the iron and the dress, and then iron presses the parts into a flattened form before making more rounds with the serger and the sewing machine. Slowly, the dress started to come together. The top resembled a shirt and the bottom formed a skirt.

Side note: This is where dress-making gets tedious. But pushing through the doldrums of mid-creation is the hardest part in ANY project. I think about the proverbial hill at the end of a marathon, where the best advice is to keep your head down and keep moving one foot in front of the other. I wish there was a better way to get through things, but sometimes it's just a muckfest.

Left to Right: Illustration of Momola Does Her Magic. Photograph Loving the Twirl. Illustration of Love the Twirl. ©smartigraphicdesign

Eventually, I had to ask for Momola's tailoring magic to capture a hundred little details in tailoring. This is where I'm crazy lucky that Momola can fit a dress to my body with chest darts, underarm holes, sleeve lengths, smooth interior slip, etc. I followed her sparkling expertise as best as I could. But the magic is watching her wordlessly pinch, pull, sew and tailor small details that make all the difference in the fit. In the end, the dress came out gorgeous, fit beautifully, and twirls like a dream.

Illustration How To Make a Dress With Momola. ©smartigraphicdesign

All my life, Momola has been one of those ladies with a can-do spirit that's bewitching. She'll try anything and can do almost everything. Carpentry, tiling, ceramics - it's delightfully fun to watch and a lesson that crafting is a learned intelligence that comes with time, practice and attempting things in different arenas. I'm grateful I get to be reminded of this when I watch her in action. A hearty thank you goes out to Momola for teaching me some new tricks and using her magic to bring yet another garment to life!

Illustration Thank You Momola. ©smartigraphicdesign

happy dress-making dear friends,

smarti

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