I finished weaving the fabric for Autumn Splendor yesterday, and dyed it today.  I’m going to rinse it out in an hour or so, after which it will need a good, solid hard press.  Then I’ll be ready to start cutting and sewing!

Towards this, I’m currently printing out all the pattern pieces.  The pile of paper on the floor below the printer is about fifteen inches high right now, and I’m only about halfway through printing!  I have to babysit the printer for another hour or so, until it’s done.

Then, tomorrow, I will lay out all the pattern pieces.  Some of the panels have minor flaws, so I’ll match them with pattern pieces to minimize flaws in  of the finished garment.  Then I will need to match up the color sequence for all the light-colored panels, matching first at the waist and then checking again at the shoulder.  After I’ve got those placed, then I’ll lay out the dark panels.  It’s going to be a fairly complicated layout, and I want to make sure I’ve thought things through.  So I’m going to lay out and pin all 10 pattern pieces before cutting into anything.  Measure twice, cut once!

Oddly, I’m more nervous about cutting into the panels than I was about cutting into the wedding-dress fabric.  The panels are more time-consuming and fussy to weave than the wedding dress fabric was; each panel takes about 10-12 hours to knit, dye, unravel, weave, and overdye.  And the pattern layout is far trickier: the color sequences need to match as perfectly as possible.  Finally, I don’t have any extra yardage, so I had better get it right the first time!

So the ritual first cut will happen tomorrow, in all likelihood.  I’m totally amped.

Meanwhile, two other things are cranking the excitement level to a fever pitch:

• We are now preapproved for a loan on our putative first house.  Meeting with a realtor tomorrow evening.  I’ve spent part of today looking at house listings, and am getting really excited!
• I’ve started planning for a Handwoven Garment Challenge project.  I already know what I want to do, but I will need to refine and fit several muslins before I can start.  So the design process will need to start soon!

I’m also engaged in some interesting discussions about other venues where I can write (paid) weaving-related content….that’s all I can say about it right now, but it’s sounding like a WONDERFUL opportunity!

This is all so exciting I hope I can get  to sleep!

Well, almost.  I still need to wet-finish, dye, and rinse out the fabric.  I’ll do that today.  Then I can start sewing!  I’m really excited, things are coming to the finish line at last.

And now, the really, amazingly good news: Sharon says it should be quick to sew, and I can probably finish it in about two weeks!  I had expected it to take about five.  That gives me eight weeks before the deadline for the Complex Weavers juried exhibit, and nine weeks before the Handwoven garment contest deadline.  That’s enough time to cobble up an entry into at least one of those exhibits, especially if I use my languishing-for-two-years Celtic braid fabric.  Very cool.

The original inspiration - Ambassador Delenn's robes in the TV series Babylon 5. I liked the flowing, graceful feel, and loved the character as well.

Next, in this blog post, I speculated on the design:

I want to do more work with the “Autumn Splendor” theme – developing the concept into something more concrete, something I can actually embody.  Right now I have a vision of falling maple leaves, glimpses of gold glitter, and brocade over flowing silk.  I have to figure out how to transform that into something I can actually make.

One of the ideas I have been playing with is the transient nature of autumn.  As a child, I was fascinated by the leaf bookmarks that my parents would bring home from Taiwan – leaves treated with acid to burn away the soft parts, leaving only the spidery, skeletal veins.  It reminded me a little of the decorations people put up around Halloween – except this was a skeleton leaf, not a skeleton person.  Same thing: beauty in transience, delicacy in death’s remnants.

So I really liked the idea of “ghost leaves”, skeletal remnants of a woven design suggesting a leaf.

Skeletal remnants of a woven design, of course, leads directly to devoré, a technique in which the cellulose components of a fabric are “burned out”, usually with sodium bisulfate, leaving only the protein/synthetic components.

I did one pattern sketch, which looked like this:

First design sketch for "Autumn Splendor".

My quest for devore led next to the disastrous sample with cotton-wrapped polyester sewing thread:

Devore sample, in cotton-wrapped polyester sewing thread

Here I was using a network drafted pattern to give the “feel” of wavy, leaf-floating-to-the-ground patterns, which failed.  The fabric, woven with a tightly spun, glazed, cotton-covered polyester sewing thread, also felt just plain nasty.

Back to the drawing board, and another attempt at devore, this time with tencel threads alternating with gold polyester machine embroidery thread.  I had to invent a Photoshop technique to design this one:

first attempt at devore, burning out the tencel to create a gold mesh in the background

Quite a bit of fiddling with painted warps and knitted blanks later, I had created this sample:

1st sample with changing colors

which burned out to this sample:

same sample, post devore

This came out beautifully, but the mesh was far too delicate for a garment.  I went back to the drawing board, and decided to reuse a muslin/design that had proved unsuitable for a different project, and to experiment with a maple-leaf design:

composite photo showing colors, muslin, and proposed draft for Autumn Splendor

I liked this, and developed the idea further, weaving more samples and playing with different surface design treatments.  Here is the one I liked best:

first panel for Autumn Splendor

Meanwhile, I was designing the muslin.  I played with colored pencils, and decided to try contrasting colors, one dark panel, one light.  Here is the sketch I liked best:

Design sketch for Autumn Splendor, with an asymmetric back

But when I tested it against the muslin, I didn’t like the lines in back at all:

mockup of sketch, in the actual fabric

The lines were far too angular and abrupt to represent the downward drift of an autumn leaf.  I decided to make the lines curvy, and did a Photoshop simulation to see whether it would work:

curved muslin - Photoshop mockup

I liked this idea, but the pattern changes would have been far too difficult to execute on a paper pattern.  So I studied up on Adobe Illustrator, and learned to draft sewing patterns on the computer:

sewing pattern for coat, rendered in Adobe Illustrator

This made pattern drafting far easier, and I created the altered muslin without problems.

Many muslins passed.  Finally, on muslin #10, I was feeling stuck.  The front felt too heavy, and the curve awkward, dominated by the long collar.  A friend saved me from design despair when she asked, “Is the collar really necessary?”  And I realized that no, it wasn’t!  Long ago and far away, in the previous project, the collar was the focal point, but now it was an unnecessary distraction.  I eliminated the collar, and the final design for Autumn Splendor fell into place:

muslin #10, eliminating the collar

At this point, it looked nothing like my original design inspiration or either of my design sketches – but it was far better than either in execution.

One more muslin, to test what it would look like with the actual colors:

muslin 11, testing the colors

I really really love this design and will use it for the final piece.  I will sew one more muslin for fitting purposes, and then launch into sewing the actual garment.

And that’s it!  The voyage is not over yet, and I expect some tweaking as I assemble the design, but the basic design is in place.  It’s been fascinating to me to “stroll back through time” and see how the design has evolved, and all the many things I learned in this journey.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this retrospective as much as I did!

Muslin #11, partially sewn

Yeah.  It’s gonna be gorgeous.

I have found a few flaws in my pattern, which means I will have to re-cut one of the back panels.  I also need to put on the facings, press the seams, turn up the hems, yadda yadda yadda, but I already know the important thing: it’s going to be spectacular.  If the color-play looks that good in a crudely dyed muslin, just imagine it in the actual fabric!  I am dying to see it in the real fabric.

But first, I must finish perfecting the fit…which means back to Illustrator to redesign and recut my muslin!

Watch this space!  I expect to finish muslin #11 tomorrow.

While I am not quite up to normal energy, I’ve gotten quite a bit done:

• dyed the dark panels for muslin #11
• rinsed out the light panels for muslin #11
• woven about three-fourths of a dark panel
• taped together all the pattern pieces for Autumn Splendor
• re-re-re-vised and printed out the mindmap/outline for my book, which – egad! – is now about four feet wide and three feet tall when printed.  (Time to stop mindmapping and start writing!)
• reboiled the syrup for the citrus peels, adding more sugar so they continue candying
• roasted a duck stuffed with fig and sausage for Christmas dinner.

The dyed panels of flannel aren’t a perfect match for the “real” panels, but they are not too far off either:

Top:handwoven panel; bottom: flannel mockup

I’m looking forward to seeing them sewn up!

And here is a shot of the dark panel in progress:

dark panel, halfway woven

Plan for the next 4 days is to get muslin #11 sewn, and weave as many panels as I can before leaving to visit Mike’s family in Chicago.  The timeline is still going to be really, really tight for having it photographable on Feb 15, but I think it’s doable.

Off to eat that delicious roast duck!