The Purple Prom Dress

Happy (late) summer! We had a jam-packed summer break, which I will recount later, but this week, the kids are settled into school (and uni), so I'm catching up on posts and such. Do people still write blogs these days? Or read them? Or is it all just tiktoks and instagram? I feel very behind the times, plodding away here on ikatbag. Maybe I'll try instagram sometime. Apparently I have an account, but I keep forgetting and people have to remind me. It seems rather out of character for me to just post pictures (let alone just one!) and not also write a novella accompanying them. But I get it - times have changed, and maybe people now only have the attention span of a flea, so perhaps byte-sized social media is the way to go.

See - this is what I mean: that first paragraph of nonsense prolog. I don't know if instagram and I can even be friends.

But let's talk about this purple prom dress already.

In May, Jenna went to prom. And needed a dress. The only things certain at the time were that it had to be purple and textured. There was the usual feeble concession of If We Can't Buy It I'll Sew It, which both Jenna and I knew really meant We Won't Be Able To Find What We Want In Stores So Let's Start Drafting Yesterday. I knew it would be work - it usually is, to take an idea in one's head and bring it to life - but experience has shown me that in each instance of handmaking an important garment, nobody regretted having chosen that over ready-to-wear.  And the reasons range from practical (it's a more efficient process than trying to buy - and return!- RTW), to emotional (there are limited school formals left to sew dresses for, sniff). 

Then I caught myself for that "but", as if I had to justify my choice. Let's take a quick tangent here to explain.

Some of you know that I've been in therapy and initially it was because Dad died unexpectedly some years ago and threw me for a loop. Since then it's evolved into an exploration of loss and what it means to be the sole immigrant from my family in this country, plus all the ways I'm becoming whole in the aftermath of both. One of the most useful concepts I've learned, not only through in-person therapy but also from books and podcasts containing the wisdom of others who've had these experiences before me, is the idea of "And also." 

Particularly for a person like myself who's been trained to think analytically and methodically, the idea of "And" initially was weird. We science-y sorts prefer "But". "But" brings with it demarcation and the clarity of contrast, which is important in precision: we define things as much by what they are as what they are not. To become whole after loss, though, involves integration and creation, a building up of parts that have meaning on their own but which are also so much stronger fitting together in congruent ways. 

Hence "And also".

For instance, I've learned that I can be Asian and also embrace Western American values, that I have robust family and friend support networks in Singapore and also in Minnesota, that I can have lost a parent and also have an emotionally denser and authentically meaningful relationship with the remaining parent, that my teenagers can be independent and also excited about close ties to their family.

And as those teenagers grow out of the house, hurtle toward graduation and becoming newer and fuller people through their college years, I can be sad about how fast those the child years have disappeared and also be 100% unafraid to experience all the manic milestones of both senior year HS and freshman college year: auditions, concerts, football games, swim meets, homecoming, prom, apartment move-ins, apartment move-outs, summer jobs, clothes acquiring and clothes donating. And also be excited about their future decisions and adventures. And also be apprehensive. And also ignorant. Bewildered. Confident. Thankful. Proud.  

Because we never know what the future will bring - and how it might even surprise us by its providence. 

Like that one day this past summer when Emily wanted to sew shorts. And we went shopping and drafted (traced from an old pair she loved, actually), and she made herself these: 

Did I see that coming during her senior year as she was packing up her stuff in her car and driving away to her new apartment? I did not. Could I have visualized her bringing that same stuff back to this house less than a year later, then spending the next three months just hanging out here with the cats, completing once more our table of five, working two (very fun and very in-character) jobs, as well as several craft fairs I got to help with, as if that move to college never happened, except it did, because she was now so much more poised and serene, and also deeper and brighter and braver? I couldn't have - my Graduation-Day brain, wallowing in the emotions of loss, had ultralow expectations; it certainly did not have the bandwidth to imagine that this change could be good, let alone this good. 

Fast forward to a year later, to Jenna and her dress. And to me weighing the pros and cons of Sewing vs Buying. I finally decided there didn't need to be a But, wherein I rationalized Why Homemade Was Ultimately Worth It. Instead, I thought, "Yes, it would be lunacy. And also I want to do it." No justification needed.

And that's where we are today - taking you through the process of this dress coming together. Because if you thought Emily's green prom dress was a lot of work (and I did, too, at the time), that definition was about to be completely revised with Jenna's purple one. 

First, as I'd mentioned earlier, was simply the framework that it had to be purple and textured. So we went shopping for fabric, and found this sheer lace with floral motifs along one edge. Right away, looking at it, we knew it would be the border detail for the skirt hem.

Then we found lavender satin for the underlay. The sheer layer on top provided the texture we were looking for.

Second came the sketch. This was the prototype. Jenna quickly vetoed the double straps and we simplified the design to single cross-straps.

Then I drafted the block and pattern. Each piece of the initial outer dress was two-layered: the satin with the sheer lace. The skirt had to be cut out first, to place and reserve the embroidered border design. The remaining clear sheer section was then used for the bodice.

Here are those two layers basted together. My mother had been right about hand-basting all this while: that it is indeed superior to pins, particularly in garment making. I remember teen LiEr hissing and grumbling each time I was made to hand-baste, begging instead to be allowed to just use pins, or press lines with the iron, or anything else, really, as a faster alternative. Hilariously and ironically, these days, I find myself choosing to hand-baste at the slightest opportunity. Oh, the wisdom of hindsight - and of those who knew better. 

Here's the bodice, with its still-visible hand-basted CF seam.

Up to this point, I did not consider this Work - the design was pretty straightforward, the pieces came together quickly and the fabric wasn't especially fiddly to work with. It took maybe a day, day and a half. After this, though, came the circus. Here is a shot of the plain bodice - the plan was to cut out lace motifs and stitch them onto the bodice to create texture that would complement the edge design on the skirt hem. I reminded myself that as I'd done something similar for Emily's green prom dress, this would be more of the same. I forgot, however, that with the green prom dress, the bodice was covered by whole lace fabric, with just additional motifs sewn onto the skirt and back. This purple dress was quite the opposite in that I had to create that whole-lace look myself.

Here is a shot of that bodice in progress. Each bit of lace had to be handstitched onto the main dress (and hand-basted before that!)

It was, as my kids say, sooooo extra. And naturally it ended up being a last-minute thing, although not from procrastinating; it simply just took this long. I sewed all day the day before prom, then on the morning of, I sat at my sewing table and stitched 6 hours non-stop. 

When Jenna's friends came over in their dresses to do their hair and makeup together, I was still sewing. 

And when we got to the park for the photoshoot, I was still pulling basting stitches out of the bodice. While the cameras were rolling, yes.

Which explains why there are many shots of the dress on Fleur, my mannequin, and not so many on Jenna, because there was no time to do a posed photoshoot of her in it before she threw it on and raced to the park to take photos with her friends. It was only days after prom that I put the dress on Fleur and got most of these pictures.

Here's the back.

And here is the full frontal shot

the bodice,

and that skirt hem.

That crazy embroidery wraps around the side

and to the back.

This is the full back view.

A couple of the very few full front solo shots of Jenna and one side-ish one.

One of her corsage, which Emily made

and one of her with Kate, who came to the photoshoot for "moral support and comedic relief", in her words.

More posts coming up soon. One is a project Emily has been working on, and another is an update on stuffed toys and such. And also I have thoughts to share on sending a first kid off to uni. See you again soon!

Star Wars - Millennium Falcon

I am so excited to show you our Millennium Falcon! 

It's a playhouse of sorts for the Star Wars peg people from this earlier post.

If I ever had a craft bucket list, this would've been on it.

Before we go any further, I want to tell you about Lindsey. If you've been around craft blogs for a while, you might've been familiar with Lindsey's blog Filth Wizardry. She is an absolute genius -  her ideas and projects were always way, way, outside the box, mind-blowingly original and so utterly, inspiringly fearless. One of my favoritest of those projects was this Millennium Falcon she and her husband Paul built in 2010 from thrifted items. I remember seeing it and wishing my kids had been into Star Wars (or anything Sci Fi, really) so I had a reason to attempt to make something even close. But it was not to be - as I'd mentioned in the last post, we stayed in a princess phase for a very, very long time, which then morphed seamlessly into a Harry Potter phase, then slime and Minecraft. And by the time Star Wars finally became a thing much later, it felt like the ship had sailed, both literally and figuratively.

Then, more than a decade later, my nephew was born, and the stars aligned so that this year, he became besotted with Star Wars. And I saw this for the second chance it was to make this crazy, wonderful dream project. I pulled up Lindsey's blog and read all her notes, in addition to Paul's, and then very quickly realized that the found objects which were easily accessible 14 years ago were totally not so today. Still, I loved their concept and design for the Falcon, and decided it was worth doing the research needed to locate present-day alternatives to recreate it, if it were even possible.

Seven weeks later, here is my version of their Millennium Falcon - it looks a little different but I kept as many of their original features as I could. 

I'll give you a quick tour. It's essentially a plastic microwave lid sitting on a circular wooden serving tray, with holes cut into the plastic lid for a cockpit

and a fold-up ramp.

Inside the ship, there is a removable partition

 that loosely divides the base into four rooms

The cockpit is an air freshener container whose top can be removed so the regular sized peg people can get inside. Here's Han Solo in it. Unfortunately Chewy, being taller, doesn't fit. 

Although there wasn't an occasion in the movies for all the characters to be together on board, here they are now, all gathered for a photoshoot.

Here are some shots of Kate (now 15!) playing with it. 

Watching her, I felt like something had come full-circle - I think it was the (very) delayed gratification of finally having built this for my kids to play with, even if it was for just a few minutes. There was a tiny bit of Please Can We Keep It imploring but everyone knew that it had always been meant for another little child to own, and we were ultimately excited to think of him opening the gift and enjoying it.

So, let's deconstruct now. I didn't want all my research to go to waste, so I thought I'd do a tutorial so I could share it with you. Here's a funny thing: for the longest time, I didn't even want to commit to painting the peg dolls until I was fairly confident I would be able to build the Falcon, and I couldn't be sure of that until I'd found all the parts I needed. This took a couple of weeks - surfing the internet, going to random brick and mortar stores in search of very precisely-sized items. As an example, the most uncertain of these was the cockpit. 14 years ago, Lindsey and Paul had used a dollar store air freshener, but when I went to our dollar store (and countless supermarkets, Target, Walmart, etc.), all I found were glass plug-ins or rotund plastic things that were the absolute wrong shape. I finally found this at a local hardware store, which led to choosing the correct-size PVC pipe to fit it, and at that point, I knew I could finally begin working on the peg doll portion of this project. So conflated and silly, right?

This random jumble of parts was the first draft of sorts - I ended up tweaking the design quite a bit, and replacing what you see in the photo below with more suitable alternatives in later photos.

As with the peg dolls, I thought I would include links to the various components of the spaceship to save you the research time, should you want to do this yourselves someday. Even this second picture I took below doesn't show all the pieces I eventually used. The black 45-degree elbow joint, for instance, was not the right angle after all, and I ended up replacing it in the final design with a white 60-degree one. Still, it's a good layout of roughly what you'll need.

A: This 13" serving board was from Target here and served as the base of the spaceship.

B: This 11.6" microwave cover was from Amazon here, and was the top of the spaceship. 

All the wood extensions were cut from scraps in my garage, so they can be substituted with other kinds/ thicknesses of wood pieces. 

C: These two front mandible-looking things were cut from 1 x 4 lumber, and are roughly 3/4" thick.

D: The ramp was cut from a long strip of 1/4" x 1-1/2" plywood. I don't remember the exact length of the ramp, but it was about 3", maybe 4".

E: This strip of wood is a placeholder for this photo. I eventually cut two pieces from that same 1/4" x 1-1/2" plywood that the ramp was from. They became the "runners" under the spaceship, which I will say more about later. They served two functions: one, as an anchor for attaching the front mandibles, and two, for the completed spaceship to slide along a table surface later.

The next three items assemble into the cockpit. 

F: This eventually was replaced by this 60-degree 1-1/2" elbow joint.

G: This was a section of 1-1/2" PVC pipe (1-1/2" is the interior diameter; the outer is more like 1-3/4"), cut at an oblique angle to facilitate hardware installation. We had scrap pipe in our garage but you could easily buy a short (2 ft) length from hardware stores like this.

Save the rest of the PVC pipe because you will need scraps of it for two other applications later (not shown). 

H: This is the Glade air freshener.

J: The next two items assemble into the room dividers. I loved this idea from Lindsey's original design, and so replicated it here. The clear cylindrical bit is from a CD spindle holder, just as hers was. I cut off the base and saved just the cylindrical walls. You can buy empty spindle cases on Amazon, for instance, but mine was a donation from a neighbor.

K: The three "fins" became the walls of the room divider thing. I measured and shaped these fins according to the height and shape of the microwave lid. These were cut from scrap plywood which, if I remember right, was 3/8" thick. I dislike putting screws into the edges of plywood, because they tend to split the wood layers, so if you have regular lumber of appropriate thickness, use that instead.

L: These are little wooden discs I had in my wooden blanks stash. Some of these were 1-1/4" and some were 1-1/8". They are surface embellishments for the top of the spaceship. I also used a 2" disc (not shown because it was a later idea) for the cannon mount at the top of the ship.

M: This is a 1" hinge - I only used one of the two in the package.

Now for the how-to: first, the room divider/inner chamber thing. The three "fins" were attached to the cylindrical inner chamber with screws, 

then the entire thing was painted and varnished. 

Next, I built the main floor of the spaceship. To begin, the ramp was attached via the hinge. I pre-painted the ramp and part of the rim of the circular board around the attachment site, just so that as I layered more parts on later, I wouldn't have to shove tiny paintbrushes into nooks and crannies. Attaching the ramp first allowed me to draft the two mandibles on either side so their curvatures matched the appropriate sections on the circular board.

There are three mandibles in this next picture because one of them was a practice piece for getting used to the jigsaw. I am no woodworking expert, but I learned quickly that pre-taping the lines with masking tape really helped with getting clean, crisp cuts, especially with plywood. 

Then the mandibles were wood-glued to the two strips of plywood, 

which we will hereafter call "runners". The runners were trimmed at the top end to match the pointy tips of the mandibles - you'll see this in the next photo.

The runners were subsequently wood-glued to the curved edge and underside of the circular board. Then screws were driven in along the length of the runners. I used a countersink drill bit to drive the screw heads in flush with the surface of the wood so they wouldn't protrude and scratch whatever surface they were resting on. The resulting arrangement was very sturdy. You can also see that this sequence of assembly ensured that there was enough space on either side of the ramp for it to fold up and down easily. 

This is the top view. Because that circular rim of the base was beveled, the mandibles did not lie flush against the edge of the board, so I filled the gaps with wood filler, which looks gross and messy in the photo, but got painted over eventually.

The cockpit was next. The air freshener was disassembled and cleaned out.

The smallest part at the top had no function in this project, so was discarded. The bottom had most of its stem sawed off (this bit was discarded, too). The remaining thing I'm holding would become the front "glass" face of the cockpit.

On the main body of the air freshener, the top opening was cut off to remove the pokey-out bits. 

The PVC elbow joint would need to fit into this opening, and those bits would've prevented that.

This was roughly how these two parts would've fit together, even though I didn't end up using this black 45-degree elbow. You'll see a white 60-degree substitute in later photos.

This is a bird's eye view of the cockpit assembly. Remember the leftover PVC pipe I suggested earlier that you save? You'll need a short piece (1" is sufficient) for an inner collar to connect the air freshener to the elbow. Also visible are my pencil lines showing the position of the inner chamber/room divider on the circular board. This is to ensure I left enough room for it when attaching the cockpit system.

Finalizing the position for the hardware required roughly assembling the entire cockpit configuration and moving it around. I settled eventually on just two bolts, one through the short PVC pipe, and the other through the elbow.

Here's the side view to show you an accommodation I had to make for this particular combination of parts. The rim of the wooden board raised the entire cockpit configuration by about 1/4" off the main board surface, so I used a couple of 1/8" thick wooden discs (again, they were on hand and therefore convenient) to keep everything level. 

 

Once the positions of the bolt holes were finalized, the holes were drilled, and then the painting could happen. The entire wooden section of the spaceship was painted separately from the PVC parts. There is a flat circular disc in the photo below which I'll mention later.

Before the cockpit was added to the board (bolt holes visible in the photo), felt was glued to the runners. It was just easier to add the felt at this stage while the board could still lie flat upside down.

Then the bolts and nuts were put in to attach these two components to the wooden base.

Side shot: the two blue arrows show where the bolts went.

In the picture below, you can see the unpainted collar used to connect the air freshener to the elbow joint. It was hot-glued in place.

This is the completed cockpit. 

and the base of the spaceship at this point. 

Here is the room divider in place. It's a pretty snug fit alongside the cockpit system but there was actually a fair bit of wiggle room even when the lid was on.

On the underside of the wooden board: the felt-topped runners.

The base of the spaceship - completed.

The lid (microwave cover) portion of the spaceship was a more straightforward process to work on. First, holes were cut into the front and side to accommodate the ramp and the cockpit. Full disclosure: the plastic of the microwave cover, particularly the rim, was thick and challenging to cut through with just the exacto knife I was using. It probably would've been very easy with a dremel, but I didn't have one. At the time I wasn't aware of this, but I've since read (on the internet) that people use a hairdryer to soften plastic before cutting into it. Now, given that this is a microwave lid, I don't know if the plastic is especially heat-resistant, so this tip may not work. If anyone tries this, let us know in the comments how it went!

The next step was to sand the smooth surface of the plastic, to give the primer, glue and paint something to grab onto. See that little grey circular doodad? It was the vent of the microwave lid, and you can twist to rotate it. I had plans to attach a satellite dish to it because the Millennium Falcon had one, but eventually decided it might just be one more thing to break off during play, and so left it out.

Speaking of embellishments, there were any number I could've add to the lid to make it more closely resemble the Millennium Falcon, but I chose just a few so that the finished look was symbolic rather than a literal replica. The first was the laser cannon on the top of the ship. It was made with toothpicks glued to a small bit of plastic, and the whole thing glued to a pre-painted 2" wooden disc. This disc, like all the other surface embellishments, was hot-glued to the microwave lid. However,I assumed that because it was centrally-placed, this disc might end up being a convenient knob of sorts to lift the cover on and off during play. With that new function in mind, I added a bolt and nut to make it extra secure.

Six smaller wooden discs were painted and glued on for the Falcon's iconic heat exhaust vents. 

The side airlock was a wooden disc inside a 1/4"- thick ring of leftover 1-1/2" PVC pipe. The actual ship has two airlocks, one on each side,

but I only used one because there was a hole on the other side for the cockpit.

The backlight exhaust thingy was just a section of the rim painted metallic blue.

These are the three parts of the spaceship, with some of the peg people for size reference.

And a couple more gratuitous brag shots.

I had so much fun building this. There are some projects that you want to get done quickly before they turn into those cursed WIPS languishing forever under your sewing table, and so many of those still live in my house. But this was different - I knew from the beginning that this would be long-haul, but the momentum never flagged, and even the problem-solving-research phase felt like a treasure hunt. I can't remember the last time I got to be so obsessively immersed in a craft project - I was both relieved and sorry when it was finally finished!