Accommodating the bountiful booty and hemming the wedding dress

Dear Readers,

You would think that hemming the skirt of a wedding dress would be one of THE most easy steps involved in sewing an entire dress....aaaaaand, you'd be wrong.

Getting the hem of the dress, when worn, to be parallel to the floor--ALL the way around the skirt takes some work.  You'd think it would be as easy as measuring how long you want the skirt to be, laying the skirt out on the floor, marking that length all the way around the skirt and cutting/hemming. 

But, no. 

I have always needed, when making dress slacks anyway, something called a "full butt adjustment." No, that's not when you reduce your butt volume by diet, exercise, or liposuction. 

The full-butt phenomenon suffered by many a woman, where normal pattern dimensions are merely insufficient in the booty-area, forcing us home sewers to kind of "explode" the rear end of our pants pattern to squeeze a little more fabric into the back of the slacks so they fit properly.

You're probably asking yourself, "What does making pants have to do with skirts?" 

Because I have this full-butt adjustment issue in slacks, it also means that if I don't address the issue when making skirts, I have an uneven hem.  More specifically, when wearing skirts that are the same length all the way around (AKA, all skirts sold in stores) it appears as if my garment is 2 inches too short in the back.  Picture, if you will, a skirt hitting me above the knee in the back and 2 inches below my knee in the front---YIKES!  Seriously, not a good look.  While my problem may not be as severe as this gal's, this is about how I FEEL when I know my hem is all jacked up in back.

In cases where you have odd things about your body you need to work with while making a garment, you'd usually just have your seamstress pop you up on a chair, pin the skirt to the desired length while spinning you about. 

But, I'm my OWN seamstress and do not own an extra pair of hands that operate independently from my body.  Dang.














The solution for a singular seamstress with a mere pair of hands?  This doo-hickey...

Craig was nice enough to pump the bulb for me (because my squeezy-bulb-connection-thingy isn't long enough for me to operate when standing next to this contraption!).  With each squeeze, he sent out plums of white chalk into the air, every time I commanded, "SQUEEZE!"  I simply spun around, and uttered this word until we'd made our way all around the dress.  This ENSURES a hemline that is parallel to the ground...even in the rear!

These doo-hickey's generally come with white chalk, and I had a white-ish dress, so marking the hemline was tricky.  Luckily, the chalk has a matte finish to it, and the dress has a sheen.  So, while I couldn't see the chalk marks all that well, I just had to hit the skirt with the right light and angle to see where the little white matte mark would show up. 

All that was left for me to do was pin the remaining fabric up out of the way, and press the new hem into place with my iron.

Afterward, I trimmed the fabric down to roughly 2.25 inches, folded down and pressed a scant edge, and sewed that down by machine to prepare for hand-hemming the skirt.

Here's a post that describes 5 different methods for hemming a skirt.  I decided on the catch stitch.

Hemmed portion on top.  Pinned portion on bottom.  You can't see the hem stitches, can you?

Ta-da!  The finished product, with the teal colored tulle trimmed to the appropriate length so that it peaks out from under the skirt.









 



What's left to do:

1)  install zipper
2)  reinforce lace sleeve stitches
3)  determine if lace overlay needs boning/stabilizing in the center back
4)  start doing all the things you do when your wedding is 4 weeks away (ack! it's here!!)
5)  don't panic