Sewing for my wedding part three: a Comedy of Errors

This is gonna be a long one, so TL;DR: I've screwed up a bunch while making the dress, but I'm incredibly lucky so it's turning out well anyway!

Note: this post was published after it was written. It was written on March 8th, posted on Patreon on March 9th, and posted publicly on Blogger on March 12th. I will generally be posting about a post a week (until my general posting frequency goes down) on Patreon with one week of early access, but the ones in quick series such as this one may be faster just to avoid public readers getting weeks behind what I'm doing on a particular project.

On Monday, I was working on my fiance's wedding dress for most of the day, and I got very little done. Everything was cut and I was ready to sew once I switched the thread in my machine to white (I had been using black for the test pieces, just because it was already in the machine and I knew I would need a lot of white thread in the upcoming days). Fortunately, as I was about to start sewing the actual bodice of their dress, I stopped myself because I realized I had sewn nothing with this fabric and this thick and ever-so-slightly stretchy suiting would probably require a different tension than the muslin I had been using. So I started my test swatch with scraps that had been generated when we were cutting out the pieces. Thus began the comedy of errors.

When I first heard about thread and bobbin tension, I asked my mother about it. She was the one who first taught me how to use a sewing machine, after all, and my sewing machine was actually hers until she realized I would use it a lot more than she had been. What she told me with regards to bobbin tension was that I would rarely need to adjust the bobbin tension, and what I needed could probably be done with adjusting the thread tension. I still live by this advice, as many sewists do. However, how she told me to adjust the thread tension was what led to a lot of my struggles on Monday. She told me that if the thread on the top is loose, the tension is too loose, and if the thread on the bottom is loose, the tension is too tight. This makes sense from the perspective that the top is the thread and the bottom is the bobbin, so if the top is looser than the bobbin tension it needs to be tightened and if the bobbin is looser the thread tension needs to be loosened.

My first sample line was beautiful on the top, but a little loose on the bottom. So I loosened the thread tension to make it closer to the bobbin tension, and sewed another line. The problem was not fixed. I continued to slightly loosen the tension until I was almost at 0, and the thread on the bottom of the piece was still too loose! Actually, it had somehow gotten worse. So I tightened the thread, and kept tightening it, until it was up to almost 5 and I couldn't do much sewing without the needle unthreading. Obviously, that was too tight. Frustrated after at least 20 minutes of going back and forth, I finally went to YouTube. The first video I found was mostly stuff I already knew at the beginning, but I ended up stopping the video as soon as she gave one very useful bit of advice: use a different color thread for your bobbin. Disappointed that I didn't think of that, I switched the white bobbin spool for one that my soon-to-be-brother-in-law's friend had threaded when they borrowed my machine, in a color of thread I do not have and therefore will not use except for tests such as these. If you've done a lot of sewing, you probably aren't surprised to find out that the loose threads on the bottom of my sample were not from the bobbin, but rather bits of thread the needle had pushed through the fabric.

This information will ensure I don't have such confusion in the future, but it actually didn't really help me find the right tension yet. I still was unable to find any tension that wasn't either too loose or too tight, until I increased the stitch length. I had decreased it from 4 because I was just basting the test pieces and obviously I need the actual dress to be more sturdily sewn than the pieces of muslin I'll be taking apart to reuse anyway, but I ended up having to increase it back to slightly over 3 in order to find a tension that works for this fabric. It's pretty thick, which is also why we were having so much trouble cutting it.

Anyway, that took a much bigger chunk of my day than I would have liked, but now I know the proper settings for this fabric. I was then able to sew most of the bodice, although I forgot to even try to do French seams.

Just like with my driving, my memory is more of a problem than my skill level.

In order to do the steps in order, I wanted to next add fusible interfacing to the collar pieces so I could sew them. I knew that it was wise to trim the seam allowances, so I did, and then I knew that I needed to iron the interfacing to the fabric, so I sure tried! But there were two problems: firstly, the iron that my in-laws-to-be had was probably older than my fiancee, and it took about half an hour to get it hot. At the time, I thought it was partially the fault of our terrible electricity, but it was entirely the iron. The second problem was that, until I got fed up and Googled how to do it because I had been trying for a long time and I wanted to cry, I didn't realize that you needed to use steam to fuse interfacing. I went and asked my fiance's dad if he could tell me how to use steam with that particular iron--I actually had never steam ironed before and didn't realize at the time that it's simply ironing something when it's wet. He wasn't too sure himself, because he doesn't usually iron things, but he came and took a look at the iron and noticed that it literally does not have a reservoir anymore. So he ordered a new iron, which is good for the whole family because the old one doesn't really work anymore. At that point, I could have started working on the skirt, but I was exhausted and had class coming up, so I gave up for the day and waited for the iron to arrive the next.

Cut to today, because I was busy yesterday¹ and didn't get any sewing done. The iron arrived last night, and it was waiting on the table in our room when we got home from school this afternoon. With the help of my fiancee I put some water in the reservoir and booted up the iron--I now know the electricity wasn't the problem, because this one was hot within a minute! I successfully fused the interfacing to the fabric, forgoing the extra fabric you're supposed to put on top of the interfacing because I couldn't see and it also didn't seem like it was working. So of course, when I saw some orange on the off-white fabric, I feared that I had singed it. Then I picked it up and saw that it was somehow more orange on the other side... and the ironing board had a stain right under it. I hadn't singed the fabric, but I had already stained the dress before I even sewed it together! It was on an obvious place, too, on the front of their lapel. Fortunately, my fiance's mom was able to give me some advice on how to get the stain out--and it came out super easily, so I'm not entirely sure it counted as a stain in the first place. Anyway, now I'm waiting for that to dry so that I can continue sewing the collar. In the meantime, I decided to do the work on the skirt that I had been procrastinating, because I wanted to get some sewing done tonight--and then I ended up sewing for hours, only interrupted by my fiancee reminding me (later than I usually take my bedtime meds) to take my meds. I wasn't able to make the button plackets in the way that the instructions recommended, because I'm not working with the specific type of fabric that every single pattern on Earth seems to assume I must be working with, and the fabric I'm using doesn't really crease--wonderful for pictures, terrible for sewing darts and button plackets. To create a pseudo-crease, I clipped the plackets in a folded position and sewed about an eighth of an inch (3 or so millimeters) from the folded edge. This was not as difficult as I imagined it would be, as the sewing foot held the fabric down so its inability to crease didn't affect its shape as much as when I was making the darts on the bodice. I ended up with a super clean looking edge that I'm extremely proud of--to be honest, I wasn't sure I could sew a straight line so well. I think my perception of my sewing skill has been altered by how terrible I am at cutting and by the fact that one of the only items I've sewn that I've worn a lot was sewn in part while I was high. Looking at this edge compared to the hem on that skirt, I'm very satisfied with the "no sewing while high" rule I've since implemented. And the cutting should be drastically improved now that I have a rotary cutter (see footnote). I also started on the sleeves, but I was interrupted by realizing that I definitely needed to wind down and go to bed (and, as you can see, I have not succeeded in that).

In summary, I've technically been sewing the dress for two days (albeit non-consecutively), but I've had a lot of slightly comedic mistakes and inconveniences delay my progress. I believe that I've gotten out of the way now, so while I'm temporarily behind schedule, I'm now starting to make significant progress and I'm excited for the sewing in my near future.

Footnotes:

1: Part of what I had to do yesterday was go to my mom's house so she could practice doing my hair for the wedding. I went to the store while I was up there, and finally got myself a rotary cutter. I'd been delaying getting it for almost a year now, telling myself there's no need because I can use scissors. After the painful experience that was cutting out my fiancee's dress, I initially told both of us that I would finally get one once we move in the fall if I'm going to be doing a lot of sewing. But when I went to the store to get thread, I realized that there's no need to even put it off that long. Rotary cutters are small, and cutting mats are flat, so they won't take up very much space in the move (or in our current cramped living space). And I've decided I need to find a balance when I put off buying things between how much they cost and how much they'll improve my life: the cutter and the mat (the second largest available size) combined cost about 2 hours of minimum wage where I live, and they will for sure save me more than 2 hours of labor as long as I keep sewing--and now that I no longer have the reason that I haven't done much sewing lately, I'm sure I will! Also, the car parked in front of me had a cat in it, and that made me very happy as well. Anyway, I'm excited to use the new cutter to cut out my suit, rather than going through the same pain again with the same fabric.