Screen Printing and Vogue 9081

Vogue 9081 is a Marcy Tilton design for Vogue patterns. It includes a dress, as well as a sort-of cardigan. The dress can be made with a woven fabric, rather than requiring knit fabric as many of Marcy's designs do. I think it is flattering and easy to wear in the warmer months.

The last time I made it, I used a super bright orange linen. It was lovely to sew and I enjoyed making it. Wearing it was something else. I felt like a traffic cone. And so I began to rework it. You can read more about that process here.

Recently I've been enrolled in Jane Dunnewold's Screen Club. Each month she sends the students a new and interesting thermafax screen. Each month, she also provides a 90 minute live tutorial on a particular process involving screens. Sadly, she's had to terminate the subscription service. Evidently her machine could not reasonably handle that level of production. Now I will definitely sign up for a future class with her. She's wonderful - knowledgeable, inspiring, careful, intuitive and and great all-round teacher.

I found that I enjoyed the most recent topic a great deal. It involves a kind of bleach color removal with lots of safety tidbits from Jane. She is exceptionally knowledgeable here, dispelling some myths I harbored about bleach printing, as well as de-colorants.

After playing with some scraps, I decided to cut out yardage of organic cotton knit to make a dress. My idea was to screen it with bleach if it would de-color in a way I liked. My test pieces bleached to pink from this medium red. I was not sure I loved it.

So I went ahead and cut out the pieces using Marcy Tilton's old Vogue 9081. Now this was destined to be a real yawner without some kind of embellishment. I decided to go for it, but not on all the pieces. Here it is during early construction:

Three pieces have been sewn together, the main front piece printed with bleach. Now I was really unsure. I kept driving the words Pepto Bismol from my head. Not I do like pink but I just wasn't sure about this.

So I kept going. It did improve some as I attached to rest of the pieces. And it's a fun pattern to assemble. All the puzzle pieces fit neatly together.

At this stage I liked it more.

But still it did not seem right. The overall effect was somewhat jarring. I tried out various embroidery stitching on the neckline but that came out. Twice. Then I just started adding more-or-less vertical lines of running stitch in various places, especially to break up where these two pieces were sewn together.

So I added a variety of similar *lines* on the dress, trying to create a more cohesive piece. Maybe I succeeded. Maybe not. Either way, I'm wearing it!

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