Blackwater Park

So I was Being Ware....

Thread tracing new selvages isn't cutting it.  Unless I want those vertical stripes meandering on the diagonal, I have to take steps.  

The steps

I'm thread tracing the grain line exactly where I'll be placing each piece, so I can just pin the marked grain line on the pattern to the thread traced one on the fabric.

Time consuming?  Yes.  Labor of love?  Yes.  Will I be awhile?  Oh yes.

The Moral

Beware the jersey with dominant vertical (or horizontal) patterning.  Unless you really, really love it, I suggest heading straight for the abstract flowers, swirls, and geometrics.  'Cause, really, jersey is scurrilously squiggly at the best of time, so having to line up your lines on top of that is almost too much.  Better love the fabric that much is all I can say.

A Cautionary Tale

First up:

The BWOF bubble dress and the Italian jersey  I'm using for it.

Note the dominant vertical and the more hidden but no less there horizontal patterning in this particular jersey (from Emma One Sock a couple of years ago).

Note the lack of stable selvages, which means thread tracing the grain.  I went down each edge, but you could go down the middle or indeed anywhere else you like:

What's an hour of my time?  It only seemed to take forever, & a pair of these were microscope'ish  enough in function to help me see what I was doing:

Through doing this, I also found out how delightfully variable even the vertical patterning is in its printing.  Joy!  Any thought of just using the edge of the taupe rectangles as a grain line guide went out the window. (I could have, because in truth the edge of the rectangles only wanders back and forth over about 3 of those miniscule ribs.  But it's always better to at least pretend to precision.  One must have standards, after all.)

This wasn't what I did first, though.  No, that all came later.

First, I laid the jersey in question out on the table, patted its beautiful but most stretchy retro-patterned self carefully into place so there was no stretching or distortion.  Then I laid the sleeve pattern out, following the grain line, which I'd thread traced in the most helpful way.

I took up the rotary cutter.

And that was when I noticed that the horizontal patterning (the white bits with the taupe/black rectangles in the middle) were not lining up properly with the sleeve's straight edge.  

Horrors:  were the horizontals going to be caterpillaring diagonally up around my arm?

Perhaps I hadn't patted carefully enough, because surely the horizontal pattern would have been printed at a perfect right angle to the vertical?

So I pulled the bottom edge of the jersey into place.  I could tell I was stretching it, but I had to be sure.

When I laid it back on the pattern after cutting, I was sure.  Take a look at the bottom left edge:

Uh oh.

Of course, what this means is that the horizontal pattern is not printed at a perfect right angle to the vertical.  It is, in fact, off.  So any perfectly straight edge in the garment will not cut across the horizontal pattern in the same place all the way across.  The bad news is that the sleeves have that perfectly straight edge.  The good news is that that's the only straight edge at a perfect right angle to the grain line in the dress.  The other good news is that the horizontal patterning only becomes discernible where it meets a straight edge.  Otherwise it just disappears into the mix, and the verticals are dominant.

So I'm going ahead.  I don't want this dress in any other fabric; neither do I want to use this fabric for any other pattern.

Ixnay to the Pixnay

If a design is good, it should work when it first hits the eye.  The eye always knows.  Of course, the problem is that sometimes the eye doesn't like something because what it's seeing is not what it thinks it ought to see, is used to seeing, or, sadly, is conditioned to accept seeing (this last is probably the same as the first).  You can't really get around the fact that we're constantly being conditioned by this, that, or the other thing, but you can at least make sure you're always open to any new ideas that might be good, even if you can't see what they are at first.

Take Marc Jacobs.  For instance.  I'm much more automatically attuned to people like McQueen (his collections just kill me at first sight).  So, most of the time, upon first seeing Marc Jacob's work (like the fall 2009 collection just showed), I think: why does everyone think he's so great?  Then my eye adjusts,  and I think: oh, yes, how cool.  He has very good ideas.

Not that I like everything he does, but the eye adjusts, and I can actually see what he's doing and why.  And then I find good things that I want to be in clothes.  My clothes.

So if your instinctive reaction to a design is yuck, it's good to take a step back and bring the intellect into play.  Quiz yourself to find out if you're just conditioned and hidebound, or if the design truly isn't that great.  Frankly, if the eye doesn't like it, AND words can't persuade otherwise, then the eye is probably right: it's looking at a stinker.

All this by way of saying I'm not going to be making that flower garden murder of a jersey dress.  I haven't been able to reason my eye out of its first reaction.  It just doesn't like it.  So ixnay to the pixnay (this is my pig latin; the only pig latin I know; and I think I made it up anyway, seeing as how I don't actually know pig latin.) There'll be another BWOF out soon.  

And another.

And another after that, etcetera, etcetera., to quote the King of Siam (I don't actually like this movie, though).

In other words, no one will be lacking for jersey dresses to make, least of all me.  And that is all I have to say about that.

Now I'm going away to trace a pattern.

What's Ruling the Waves These Days?

Why jersey knits, of course.  I have a mad crush on them right now and think they're exactly what's been missing from my wardrobe, so I've been perusing the last few BWOFs and have settled on several possibilities.  

The one I really love: I'd forgotten about this one and could just kick myself for not having immediately tried to find the fabric.  But I was heavily mired in the LAMB jacket at that time, so you might say say I was distracted.  Anyway:

I really love this.  But that love is admittedly fabric-dependent.  I could always piece it, but a woven might be better for that than jersey, and I do like the fact that it is jersey.  Still, it's an idea.  I had a brief foray into quilting a few years ago, and while I don't really like quilting, I know how to do it, and this would be quite easy to piece.  This is one to think about, anyway.

In the meantime, there are several others I intend to make (ok, one of them's not jersey):

   

This next one too, though I find this fabric indescribably ugly, so will be looking for something quite different:

And then there's this, which I don't know about, but I'm on the hunt for jersey dresses, so it's at least a possibility:

Here's the thing: it could be good because of the novel shoulder treatment.  However, that same shoulder treatment could equally make it not good.  Thoughts?

Here are mine: although I like the idea of it, I don't know if the puffed sleeves coming off a dropped shoulder is such a good idea.  It smacks of something I don't really like.  Maybe because it makes the arms look like they come off the shoulders in a rounded, bendable doll kind of way?  

Anyway, I don't really like how the sleeve/shoulder structure works in practice.  Now, the picture is of a mannequin, but unfortunately you don't get a better look at the dress in the magazine because the model is turned sideways.  There's probably a good reason why they don't want you to see it head on--those shots don't happen by accident.  And in fact, there's a top version, and in that photo, you can see enough to see that it might not be such a flattering design.  

There's also something about the neck.  And the fabric looks like an accident (I'm not partial to these kinds of patterns at the best of times), but I'm trying to see past the fabric choice.  Perhaps it isn't the best marriage of fabric and style either.  

There just seems to be something wrong about this dress.

So I'm thinking not on this one.  What I don't want to do is make it to find out.  

Finally, isn't it excruciatingly helpful of BWOF to offer these mannequin shots on their website?  I saved them to my desktop and have been viewing them together in a kind of panorama, which definitely helps with trying to form opinions.  It's a big improvement over keeping messy stacks of magazines on the floor next to your chair just in case you want to look at patterns instead of work.   (Not that anyone ever does that.  Ha!)