Cream Puff Dress, Part 3: Assembling Pattern Pieces, and Lining

Last time, I showed you how I had tile printed the three pattern pieces for the Cream Puff Dress, for Little Miss.  I had 8 sheets of paper for each pattern piece.  I was planning to tape them together.

Using Contact Paper to Assemble PDF Pattern Pieces

 

Then, in my mailbox, what should appear?  A wonderful blog post, that made it all clear. 

At www.beccascreativenotions.com, the author explains how to use contact paper to assemble your tiled pdf pattern pieces.  I decided to try it. 

It was simple, folks!  Assembling the first one took WAY too long; once I got the hang of it, I got MUCH  faster.  It took about two hours to complete the whole process.

1. This part is obvious.  Figure out what length of paper you need, cut it off the roll, and remove the backing.  (Little Miss helped with this.)
2. Organize your tiled printed out pieces in order.  I decided I prefer to start from the top down, and complete the entire left side before completing the right side.  It was easier to keep the alignment correct while working vertically.
3. On each piece of paper, I marked the seam allowance, and the 1/8 of border that needed to be trimmed.  I realized that not every border needs trimming, only half of them do.  It's easiest to match the lines when you place a trimmed border slightly overlapped onto an untrimmed border.  So I only trimmed the upper edges of the pattern pieces on the left side, and the upper and left-hand edges on the right side.  (This way, as you work down the right hand side, you overlap a trimmed border to the lines above, and the lines to the left.)
4. Stick the pieces down!  Once again, I was glad I had used graph paper for the original pattern drafting.  The extra lines made it that much easier to match up the edges!
5. Cut out the pattern along the outer edges of the seam allowance. 

Original 1/4 scaled pattern pieces, with full scaled pieces,
assembled with contact paper





Easy peasy!  A little time consuming, but definitely more precise than taping paper together, and it's also sturdier.  Thank you, www.beccascreativenotions.com!

 








Sewing the Lining!

To test the pattern, I decided to sew the lining of the dress! 



Cream Puff Dress Lining


Only the bodice section is fitted, so I cut my pattern pieces from the top to the waistline seam in cotton batiste.  I sewed up the seams, and held it up to Little Miss--it fits, and the seams match exactly where they should--curved lines in front, side seams at the sides, and back seam in the middle of the back.

 

Cream Puff Dress Lining:  Little Miss is holding the sides, since I haven't put in the back closure yet; but I promise it fits!

 

And, it looks cute, too!

The best part about this design is that it sews up really quickly.  It took a lot of math, pattern drafting, fudging numbers, cutting and stapling paper, printing, and contact paper pattern piece assembling.  All that before I could even cut and sew any fabric.

I'm so pleased with the results so far.

And you were worried that I didn't know what I was doing!

Till next time,--Ayana

The Cream Puff Dress Experiment

Testing Patterns with Paper

So, you all know about tissue fitting a pattern, right?  Since I'm not actually using tissue, that's a little difficult.  (Remember what happened with the Golden Goddess Skirt?)

After my pattern drafting from the previous post, I kept mulling over the problems of scale and style, and started wondering (apart from the issue of how the curved seams work in the front) whether my math and two-dimensional approach would even have the look I wanted. 

What happens if what worked on Amanda and her Golden Dress doesn't work on Little Miss and her Cream Puff Dress?  I was especially worried about whether the side seams would actually sit at the sides of the body, and whether the back seam would be in the middle.  Or, would the whole proportion be off? 

Suddenly, a light bulb went off. 

Playing with Paper

Silly goose, just cut out the 1/4 scale paper pieces I've been experimenting with, and "sew" them together with the stapler!  (I did this earlier this summer when I was experimenting with how to draft the bodice for my own dress.  More on this later.)  Then, I'll know if the shape/line/proportion work at all the way I imagined them.

{Cream Puff Dress Paper Mock-Up}

It was a little challenging to get those little pieces of paper to stay stapled, but guess what folks?  It works!  (At least, without a body inside it.)  But my curved princess seam actually did what it was supposed to when "sewed" to a straighter seam, and the straighter seam did not pull the curved seam out of position.  The front three panels look perfectly even at the sides of the "body" and create a flattering waistline.  The back seam falls right in the center and lines up exactly with the center of the front.  It even looks elegant (well, for a paper dress).

Printing the Pattern

I was so thrilled with this outcome, I had another brilliant idea.  Instead of now re-drafting the pattern at 100 percent scale, why not scan my 25 percent scale pattern pieces, blow them up by 400 percent and print them?  I thought I might do this at the print shop, but another light bulb went off.  Duh! I own a printer; why can't I print on multiple pages and tape them together?

So that's what I did.  And here is the result.



{Cream Puff Dress:  Center Back Piece, Tiled Print}

And here's how I did it.

I scanned each pattern piece into a pdf file.  Then, using the snapshot tool, I selected the image area, and selected print.  I chose "print selected image only" (this avoids having too much white space which leads to totally blank pieces of paper), selected "print tiled pages," and tried to collect them from the print tray in the correct order.

As I put the pieces in their correct spaces, I marked and numbered them in clockwise order so I could reconstruct how they fit together at some later necessary point in time.  i.e., center 3, etc.  Each panel required 8 pieces of paper.

Just to make sure, I measure the squares of the graph paper that I had used to draft the pattern.  This way, I could verify that the scale was indeed correct.  Since I had also marked the measurements on the pattern, I also measured those lines to make sure they were correct.  Everything was correct.  Yay!

Then, I learned about the plotter in the library, which prints on immense sheets of paper.  I will use that for my own dress pattern pieces, which will seem super long.

Yay! Making progress!

Till next time,--Ayana