Songs without Words

I’ve recently started dabbling in sewing (by hand), and it’s completely addictive. It’s slow but rather meditative. I began at perhaps 1 ft. / hr., but fortunately I can do 1 ft. / 10 mins now thanks to practice and improvement of technique. I was originally using pins to hold together fabric to be hemmed / joined, but now I use ordinary Scotch tape, which is much more sturdy and which doesn’t prickle my fingers. I’ve had this rather cute set of Singer hand-sewing needles (it’s like a drill bit array for those who like higher-powered tools ..) and several spools of thread for a long time, but I never really made use of them.

Years ago, I had made a clay (Sculpey) doll, barely anatomically passable, but I never had any clothes for her so she remained wrapped in Asian pear styrofoam (you know, the waffle-y kind) at the bottom of my white crafts box (with sandpaper, beads, clay, lace, felt, string, etc.). But this weekend, I decided it’d be fun to make a miniature version of Grosgrain’s “20 minute elastic-band skirt” (it takes 20 minutes IF AND ONLY IF you have a sewing machine =P), which solved the “how do you get the skirt/pants on” conundrum in the absence of miniature zippers or buttons. To match, I also made a simple top from a home-brewed pattern (basically, it uses six fabric straps to tie around the back, one pair at the neck, one at about the bra-line, and one on the lower back — because of the scale, this actually gives pretty good coverage of the back. Note of course that she’s made of clay and therefore cannot put on a regular shirt without breaking her arm.

The solution here isn’t without its problems – the elastic skirt design works well for life-sized people because the amount of girth added by the elastic is negligible. However, while everything else scales down, the width added by the elastic does not, and therefore the skirt juts out a good deal. Not that this hasn’t happened in existing dolls already. It’s not horrendous and actually fixes the problem of her not having any buttocks (because I baked her lying on her back, and that obliterated her buttcheeks, unfortunately).

In any case, onto bigger and better projects … . I’ve been looking at the array of free patterns available at sites like Burdastyle. I assembled a 1/9 scale pattern for a “coffee date dress” yesterday from the 20-page PDF to try to get an understanding of how to fit fabrics to body shapes. It’s not really that intuitive, how 2-D shapes will wrap around complex 3-D forms. But as with hand-sewing, practice definitely improves technique.