Jane's Journal

Op 't werk hebben we een aantal vaste dingen die cruciaal zijn bij het ontwerpen van mooie kleding. Zo moet je altijd, als je aangeeft dat de "stenen" (rhinestones) uitgewaaierd op het lijfje en de rok geplakt moeten worden, een geluidje maken als regen en wind: swsj-swsj-swsj-swsj
Anders klopt het patroon natuurlijk niet. Zonder geluidje weet je toch niet precies hoe de stenen geplakt moeten worden?

Verder hebben we "froezels" als officiële naaiterm. Een froezel is een strookje stof, meestal pearl chiffon wat schuin van draad is geknipt, wat met een rolzoomvoetje is gezoomd (meestal met een zigzagje). Door de rekkende schuine draad van de stof, de miniscule rolzoom en de aard van de stof gaat de froezel om zichzelf heen krullen. Een prachtige additie op elke jurk, uiteraard.

Zo, nu kunnen we allemaal prachtige jurken bedenken. Gewoon meer stenen erop swsj-swsj-swsj'en en wat froezels erbij.

The best part of my job is not the part where they push free fabrics onto me, but it's a close second. I love my job, even if I don't get to work on the pretty dresses (yet). But the part where I get free fabrics (or shoes)...that's very nice!



We're clearing away old fabrics, making space for more new fabrics and projects. We store dress projects into large boxes, all the fabrics (georgette, "twinkle" (organza), crepe, lace and lycra) and haberdashery (feathers, soft boning, beads, sometimes the rhinestones and everything else that goes onto the dress) into a single box.
Peter bought a larger Ivar cupboard for in the back today while my boss Karin sorted through the remnant bins. We keep almost all the remnants of dresses, even if it's just half a meter. Boxes of remnants, boxes with cut patterns, boxes for dresses... we get too many boxes!

Most of the fabric remnants were tossed out, but I offered to be a good home for this box of lycra. There's a few georgette fabrics (chiffons) in there as well. I was thinking patchwork gnome leggings, but a top with floaty ausbrenner (burnt) chiffon sleeves will be nice too.

Also, it's a pretty big box.

I have green, lots of blues, pinks, oodles of red and black.
Drop me a line if you want something! (I can make tops out of this. Bikini's too...)

At work we've been doing "series of sizes" for certain clothing items that sell well. Willemijn usually cuts these, so they're all packed up in plastic and ready to sew. You grab a baggie, find one or two copies of the same pattern, all pieces cut and interfacing already pressed. There's a bag for each size, so after a week's worth of work you've got one (or two, depending on demand) of each size sewn and done.

This week was the week of training shirts, which looks just like a man's shirt but has a bodystocking bottom so his shirttails don't fly up when he dances. These shirts are a lot of work for us, with at least four hours of work in them. Sewing the panels is the easy part, the collar, cuffs and buttons take more work. Four hours is the standard, but if you sew two shirts at the same time it can happen you're still sewing the buttons on the next morning.

I finally finished the last black shirt of the lot and I put it on the ironing board for a final pressing before I hang it in the store. And the iron decides to cough up a little something as a parting present, which promptly melts into the two center-back panels.
I show it to Kim and we agree, this will not do. The fabric is molten and it's right on the shoulderblade where it will show "on the floor".

We decide it's probably a similar amount of time to sew a new one as it is to rip out the entire center back, but since Willemijn points out we're running out of this type of fabric, we instead decide to rip out the offending panel and cut a new one. I sit for half an hour, perhaps more, ripping out the topstitching, seam, serged edges and everything. The panel connects to the side-back, collar, sleeve and front panels, so this is pretty fast work, all in all.

I take out the roll of fabric, cut a new center-back and center-top-back panel, and put it with the rest of the shirt.
And wouldn't you know it, the colours don't match! This shirt was cut from the old roll, from which we have finally used up all the scraps. There is no scrap left that will fit the panels and we can't use the new roll since the black is more blue than the original roll.

In the end, we decide to cut the panels from the red we have as a contrasting colour. The whole shirt is black, except for the center back which will show on the shoulders on the front and when the man turns, which is awesome. And then we cut the other panels in the new black too, since we still need a black shirt in this size after all.
In stead of throwing a lot of work out, we add a little extra work to have two shirts, and one to show off an awesome idea: That we can cut these shirts in contrasting colours every which way they want.
There, all fixed!

Vandaag mocht ik een trainingsshirt op een life-sized manne-Ken zetten en daarmee werd het officieel. De rest van de kleding volgde al snel.
Vanaf vandaag hangt de nieuwe collectie in de winkel!

Kim en ik hebben wekenlang gebrainstormd, gepuzzeld en genaaid om deze collectie tot stand te brengen en het is dan ook een feestje om eindelijk de nieuwe modellen en kleuren in de winkel te zien.

Ook zijn er drie dozen met nieuwe dansschoenen binnengekomen, en is het morgenavond koopavond! De winkel is open van 10.00 tot 20.00, dus kom vooral even langs bij QueenE (Nieuwstraat 16a, Son)

Enne... ik weet zeker dat er één bepaalde top bijzit die dolphirl prachtig zou staan!

When Peter and Karin bought another sewing machine for the store, they got a free lesson (to be booked at the store) for the user of said sewing machine. They negotiated with the saleswoman and got Willemijn and me both a spot in the lesson plan. Tonight was the night, and we were excited.
We quickly ate at work, hoisted the machines into her car and drove to Veghel. Kim had already said they were very happy to sell us new presser feet for the machine, and boy was she not kidding.

Next to that, the woman giving the lesson was a very chaotic, Ritalin-powered person who irked me to no end by not having anything prepared and was flamboyant in cutting squares of jeans fabric for us to work with.
I'd have liked to tie her to a chair with duck tape. Oodles and oodles of duck tape.

The lesson itself was rather fun, but mostly focused on the new and exciting ways to use presser feet of some € 30,- or more. We had brought a question: sewing stretchy nilo fabric with a twin needle without making a 3D effect in the fabric
But it wasn't even answered to our satisfaction! We could either set our bobbin tension by hand (error-prone), buy an extra bobbin just for hemming (€ 64,-, no thank you) or use a water-soluble interfacing on top of the fabric (let's dunk every dress in water, just to see if this soluble stuff really disappears! *snort*).

Around ten pm my brain short-circuited and I was done, with nearly 12 hours behind the sewing machine taking its toll. I could no longer absorb or make sense of what she was saying, and this was right in the middle of hemming knit fabrics. We should set the stitch length longer, apparantly, and I couldn't make sense of WHY.

However, I did learn interesting things. How to adjust the presser foot pressure, how to disconnect the feed dogs, how to select a stitch with a number higher than 9 (I thought the other 156 stitches needed an extension connected to the side of the machine to make them work, but there was just a different way of selecting these stitch numbers that wasn't apparant from the front of the sewing machine!). I learned how I could balance the feed dog movement (if going forward makes for longer steps than going backward, very important for decorative stitches!), and I learned that if you want to take forever to finish a project, and if you want to spend a thousand euro's on an already expensive machine, you can.
Mostly, the lesson was just frugal, focusing on very cute work for linens, towels, children's clothes and tablecloths. Not so very interesting for the procution work we do.

The one thing I would like to share is this 3D effect of a twin needle to hem a knit shirt by using a stitched zig-zag. Use a foot with a wide opening, and adjust the width of the stitch so you won't break your needles. Upper tension to 8, and stitch away!

Juicy detail: when I asked if she had cotton or wool quilter's batting (technically a kind of interfacing, hence it falls into the "haberdahsery" department), the woman giving the lesson snidely replied "We don't have fabrics".
Nor brains, apparantly.

The lesson is in two parts, and our next lesson is... *drumroll*... in four months. Her agenda was crazy packed full. Not a very endearing quality either.
All in all, not quite wasting an evening, but not really an enjoyable one either.

For the past week we've been working on the new collection, and as a result creative juices are splashing everywhere. With the 420 meters of Nilo fabric in six new and bright summer colours coming in, we've got quite the work (not quite yet) cut out for us.

Willemijn pointed at her midriff. "I can just see it, coming from here;" her hands moved to her waist at her side; "to here and then longer in the back. And if you do it like this..." she made a vague kimono sleeve gesture.
"Ooh, yeah, that would be sweet." Kim purred. Her sewing machine was going pedal-to-the metal fast while she held two layers of stretch fabric in place with her hands. She stopped sewing and grabbed a small square of fabric. "Is this a scrap?"
Snip, snip, the scissors cut off the top corner of the twice-folded square, making a neckline. Another snip of the scissors made the kimono-sleeve. Two pins held everything in place. A bottle of glue turned out to be too big, so instead I handed her a roll of thread.

Mr Thread showing off our latest creative explosion.

"See, that would be so fat!" Kim said, indicating the coolness factor in 80s-come-again slang.
"Very Cindy Lauper." I commented. "I can just see it now. Big hair, wide neckline, bare midriff."
Sometimes the little images work just as well as yards and yards of fabric draped over a mannequin.

Today I hemmed three pairs of pants for gentlemen. I can't tell the difference between whether they are latin or ballroom pants yet, but I can sure do a mean blind hem by now. It's all in the pressing, if that is done right, there is no need for pins. A blind hem presser foot also helps a lot.

 

The new dresses for this year's national championships are all strictly under embargo, so I can't share any of the pictures I made of sugary pink fluffy pearled and rhine stoned dresses. Rest assured I have never before seen a collection of more frills and sparkles and all the colours look like a kid's crayon box.
Also: be very afraid, it inspired me to do something "stoned" for my mundanewear.

Yesterday morning I finished the final throes of homework. After hand-sewing the lining selvedge down the center-front of my interfacing I was quite done on Tuesday, so sewing the piping from a strip of bias-cut orange linen could wait until the Wednesday morning.
Above-mentioned hand-sewing is one of those Proper Tailoring steps we learn in school, but it feels so darn useless. I still wonder whether this protects the raw edge of the interflex interfacing from butting against the center-front or whether it has some other important funcion. We also sew it down the front neckline and folding line of the lapel, so it stands to reason it has a supporting function, but you know... it's lining fabric selvedge.

Okay, all technical terms aside, after homework I went to Waalwijk for my laser treatment and then back again. I kept an eye on the trains, because in the first week of any frost or snow, about half our trains freeze to the iron rails they ride on. NS tries to compensate by letting fewer trains drive their routes, so they have more back-up equipment to replace the trains that break down. I guess, anyway, because otherwise I have no idea why they change the frequency and length of trains when it's snowing or freezing.
When I went to Waalwijk in the morning there was no traffic to Breda possible, but when I returned from it, it seemed to have been taken care of. I took the time to have a cup of coffee and then took the 14.55 train to Rotterdam which stopped moving at Tilburg Universiteit, some 2 km from our departing station, making me wish I could jump out the window and walk back home, since it didn't seem to be going anywhere.

In any case, delay-riddled I finally arrived at my dad's and spent a whole hour and a half there before I had to go on to school. My visit was too short, which means I'll have to return somewhere next week to make up for it, I guess.
After school my trip home was also delayed, leaving me to walk briskly around the new and comepletely unsheltered platform until my train arrived. Brrr. I ran into someone from Zwaard & Steen toting a wrapped longsword ("larper or swordfighter?") and we chatted a bit until Dordrecht.

Feels like I've been absolutely everywhere yesterday, but that was just due to delays and traveling taking so long. I hope today is simpler and less delayed. That would be nice.