I knew the minute I touched my fat quarters that I would be making dresses with them. One ~ some days it does feel like spring will eventually arrive and my pants get shelved during nicer weather. Two ~ I agreed to make wearable garments - that means dresses in my book.
After sketching out my ideas and pulling fabrics, I knew that I would have to add additional steps to prep my fabrics. I'm using linen as my base fabrics and I machine wash my linen dresses. So to pretreat linen I usually wash and dry it two or three times. That left me making a decision about the cotton fat quarter inserts. Now I know most quilters do not pretreat the quarters before making their quilts, but I would need to do so. I didn't want to deal with the possibility of the cotton shrinking and the linen barely doing so. Because of that everything ended up in the washing machine with two Shout color catchers.
Recently I'd bought a box of the color catchers after a reader recognized a ponte I'd bought from Fabric Mart and she left a comment saying that her piece had run in the washer. I still haven't pretreated that piece but I knew that the dye in the deep red linen would run and I didn't want it ruining the fat quarters I washed with it.
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That was the first challenge. The next was to stabilize the fat quarters. After taking them out of the dryer, I stabilized the back of each one with some lightweight fusible interfacing. I wanted the two fabrics (the linen and the cotton fat quarters) to be about the same weight. Now to be completely honest here, all of this pretreatment shrunk my fat quarters. This won't affect the way that I use them, but I don't know if it affects the rules. I don't think it should but you nevah know with those margarita challenges! *LOL*
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Finally, here is a picture of the quick sketch I made to use for the basis of the red dress.
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Originally I was going to make a skirt for the second piece but I've decided upon another dress...no sketch for this one. I'm walking around with the idea burned into my creative mind. Next up will be the pattern alterations for the Red OFCG dress.
...as always more later!
After sketching out my ideas and pulling fabrics, I knew that I would have to add additional steps to prep my fabrics. I'm using linen as my base fabrics and I machine wash my linen dresses. So to pretreat linen I usually wash and dry it two or three times. That left me making a decision about the cotton fat quarter inserts. Now I know most quilters do not pretreat the quarters before making their quilts, but I would need to do so. I didn't want to deal with the possibility of the cotton shrinking and the linen barely doing so. Because of that everything ended up in the washing machine with two Shout color catchers.
Recently I'd bought a box of the color catchers after a reader recognized a ponte I'd bought from Fabric Mart and she left a comment saying that her piece had run in the washer. I still haven't pretreated that piece but I knew that the dye in the deep red linen would run and I didn't want it ruining the fat quarters I washed with it.
That was the first challenge. The next was to stabilize the fat quarters. After taking them out of the dryer, I stabilized the back of each one with some lightweight fusible interfacing. I wanted the two fabrics (the linen and the cotton fat quarters) to be about the same weight. Now to be completely honest here, all of this pretreatment shrunk my fat quarters. This won't affect the way that I use them, but I don't know if it affects the rules. I don't think it should but you nevah know with those margarita challenges! *LOL*
Finally, here is a picture of the quick sketch I made to use for the basis of the red dress.
Originally I was going to make a skirt for the second piece but I've decided upon another dress...no sketch for this one. I'm walking around with the idea burned into my creative mind. Next up will be the pattern alterations for the Red OFCG dress.
...as always more later!