I’m of the attitude: ‘you can’t improve, if you don’t try’ so when I saw this gorgeous silk chiffon being offered by Minerva, I thought now that’s a fabric I haven’t tried!.
Chiffon has a beautiful light weight drape, is sheer, and has a crepe like texture but it is also a shifty beast, extremely delicate and not for the faint hearted. This fabric is far too good to risk stuffing up. So like all dutiful sewers I spent some time preparing. Which included delving into a plethora of Craftsy classes including one by Kenneth D King, which I totally recommend, I also invested in good quality silk pins, fine needles and ensured I had sharp scissors.
If you saw my previous post, https://www.minerva.com/posts/1078490 you will know that I cut a single layer of fabric sandwiched between tissue paper. This was subsequently sewn with the fabric still between the tissue paper to help preserve the shape of the pattern pieces and kept the fabric from moving off grain. It also prevented this delicate fabric being chewed up and swallowed into the bowels of my sewing machine. I then would ever so carefully tear the tissue paper off the fabric. After getting somewhat drowned in tissue paper and tiny pieces scattered all over my sewing room and beyond, I discovered my machine wasn’t a chiffon hungry monster after all and after sewing up the stay stitching and main seams I could get away without it. Which helped with the aftermath in vacuuming. I also pressed all seams with a very low heat.
Originally I was going to do a more elaborate pattern but I heard a little inner voice tell me ‘”keep it simple, Rebecca” as this was my first time I’ve sewn silk chiffon, I’m pleased I did. I choose my tried and true Ashton top, by Helens closet with two tiers of gathered rectangles to create a floaty, whimsical dress. I basically just used up as much of the fabric as possible and did 1.8x width of the bodice for the top tier and 1.5 x width of the top tier for the second tier. Of course a slip will need to be layered underneath or alternatively I could have lined the dress. The main difficulty I had was bias binding the neckline and armholes. I originally tried using the silk chiffon as bias binding. I won’t go into too much detail but lets just say it was a disaster and the neckline shrunk so much that I consequently couldn’t get the dress over my head. I decided to try a more stable fabric for the binding and remembered I had some scraps of silk georgette from a previous dress I made. So cut that on the bias and thankfully had much more success. The binding is more noticeable as is a different fabric but I don’t think it detracts too much. To honour this fabric all seams are finished with French seams, and I tried a new way of enclosing the gathers on the skirt, that I found on @sakijane Instagram page which I recommend checking out.
This elegant dress feels so whimsical and dreamy on. I feel like breaking out in ballerina twirls whenever I put it on. I probably won’t be putting my hand up to sew chiffon in the near future. But I’m so pleased I tried, I learnt so much sewing with this fabric and to me that is gold.
Pins and Needles NZ 