process post week 17

independent project

Tuesday was the first day I worked on the jacket, since I was done with the dress.  I ironed the dress one last time while I had it out to press the hem on the jacket, and it looked way better after I did that.  I was really worried about sewing the jacket because of the weird nylon raincoat fabric, but it was honestly really easy.  I might be biased since I just finished a 2 month long project sewing a dress from poly satin, which was a nightmare to deal with and I never want to use it again, but compared to that the nylon was a breeze.  It pressed really easily (and didn't melt onto my iron, which I was very afraid of) and it wasn't slippery to sew at all.  I didn't use pins at all and it worked perfectly fine.  The closest shade of nylon thread I could find at Joann's was red instead of hot pink, so you can see the stitches and I wanted them to be as straight as possible - they turned out completely fine and it took me like a minute to hem the whole thing.  It had to be shorter than I'd originally been planning, because the pockets were placed really high up and the fabric looked bad when you seam ripped it, but honestly I don't mind it.  The silhouette when it's cinched with the dress kind of reminds me of those fancy fur shoulder jackets you wear with nice dresses (I don't know what they're called??) and it's kind of cool.  I realized I didn't have any elastic to sew into the waistband, so I just made a channel and threaded through the cord from my old Maggie Walker sweatshirt, which worked great.
Thursday I started painting both the jacket and the dress.  I tested out the fabric paint on scraps of both fabrics.  I forgot to photograph them before I threw them away, but they weren't very interesting.  It came in a squeeze bottle that you could draw with, but I wanted rougher, messier strokes so I used a paintbrush instead, and tried to be messy while I painted.  I could only do one side of each one at a time, so I did the backs first since they matter less.  I didn't totally have a plan before I started, other than things I knew I wanted to paint, so I just put things wherever I thought they'd look good.  I don't want the end result to look too crowded, but I'll probably go back and add at least a little more to both of the ones I did today after I do the fronts.  So far I'm really happy with it, and I love the way the paint looks.  It was pretty nerve wracking doing it on the dress that I spent so much time making, but I got over it.