This dress is a hand-stitched, hand-dyed wrap dress from Alabama Chanin. In the spirit of a makealong I’m participating in through The Crimson Stitchery (Space Diva themed), I am making this dress a deep purple-blue and will use gold embroidery and beads to give it a celestial, night sky theme. My vision is for this dress to riff off of the “wizard robe” trope and give a home-brewed, witchy, magical feel.

Sept 23, 2021

Today I finally dyed all of the cut out pieces of fabric. It was a ton of work. It took hours to wash out all of the dye, and it was still releasing some blue. I had to throw it in the wash to finish it all off.

Sept 26, 2021

I ironed out and laid out all of the pieces, and I’m starting to sew. I may have cut a panel too short, because I have to ease some in, but I should check with the original pattern to see if this was intended. The piece is the back so it’s supposed to be shaped a particular way, but I’m not sure. The ball-point needles are also particularly hard to get through the thick jersey, so I wonder if I’d be able to use sharps without damaging the fabric. I’m going to just suffer through this for now. My plan is to use a backstitch towards the top, where there will be a lot of stretching, and a running backstitch for the skirts.Update on the dyeing: I rinsed off one of the pieces to see if there was any more dye, and it ran totally clear. The dye job came out very mottled, with places that are more purple and darker than others, but considering the theme of the dress, I rather like it.

Sept 30, 2021

I got 2 panels done, but then I noticed a panel was suspiciously tiny in one area so I laid it over the original pattern piece and lo and behold, the “fold the fabric in half and cut out 2 pieces at once” trick turned out to have gotten me into trouble. I’m never doing that again; the fabric has never once laid out smoothly enough to make the pieces the correct shape and size. It was so off that I cut off some length (I was going to seriously reduce the length of the dress anyway) and then cut it into strips and am trying my darndest to fit them into the the right shape. It’s going to end up being a very weird piecemeal job, but I think that’s fine! I was thinking about going for a patchy look anyway.