A Shirring Fail + a Draping Attempt (T-shirt wedding dress progress)

So I finally started Monday night on that T-shirt wedding dress costume project for work--the skit is this weekend, but I have to have it ready for a fitting on Thursday. The above is my attempt at "draping"--it's just a bunch of XL size shirts cut up and pinned together on my dress form (which has now been adjusted to approximate the woman who will be wearing it). I'm digging the wide straps and the plunging wrap / sweetheart / surplice neckline.

My original plan was to fit the bodice with shirring:

But as I should have remembered from the great elastic shirring debacle of 2010, my sewing machine REFUSES to shir with elastic thread in the bobbin. Unfortunately, this T-shirt fabric is so thick and rough, it wouldn't even shir via the zig-zag method (sewing with a zig-zag over the stretched elastic thread).

So I sewed the skirt together from two of the shirts with an elastic waistband instead. The bustle or flare or train or flounce thingie is just part of those two shirts left on. I was disappointed that the logos on the shirts are so small, so I may (if I find the time) apply larger ones with T-shirt transfers or just fabric paint.

It was such a relief to actually get back at the sewing machine. I'm a bit stressed out by the deadline, but my husband (who helpfully cut up all the T-shirts for me) keeps reminding me that this thing only has to look OK from 20 feet away from the stage, and that it is supposed to look rugged/thrown together.

It is pretty freeing to be going pattern free and just randomly cutting, draping and sewing. I am the sort of person who usually spends hours carefully aligning and smoothing and pinning and cutting my fabric perfectly on grain and making sure I cut the pattern out precisely without slicing off any tissue and... no wonder I barely sew one garment per month.

I do hope that somehow I will also find the time to sew something normal for myself to wear in time for the Brooklyn BurdaStyle Sewing Club meetup Sunday, but if not, I suppose I could bring this.

So: do you ever go pattern-free and just wing it? What have your results been like?

P.S. Tonight, June 6, at midnight EST is the deadline to enter my vintage sewing pattern illustration giveaway! Thanks to all of you for the awesome entries so far!

P.P.S. My daughter's comment looking at the dress in progress on the mannequin: "Oh a dress! Pretty! Boobies!" Toddler wisdom at its finest.

Adjustable Wedding Dress for a Mystery Bride (with a Mosquito Net Veil)!

The challenge:

• Design and sew a wedding dress...
• In less than three weeks.
• For a bride you've never met and can't measure or get measurements from. So: ADJUSTABLE.
• With little to less money (i.e. what you can scrounge up around the office). CHEAP CHEAP BEYOND CHEAP.
• In your spare time between working, parenting, and having a life and trying to finish a bunch of freelance illustration projects.
• Also: Make it funny to humanitarian aid workers.

I've mentioned before that I have an awesome job, working in marketing for the emergency medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). It's generally very serious humanitarian business, but once a year at the afterparty for our annual general assembly, some of us put on a little skit with sketches, music, dancing and costumes.

And this year, part of our skit involves a wedding—and somehow, I found myself volunteering to make the dress. Even though we're not quite sure who will be playing the bride, so I somehow have to design it to fit ANYONE. (I'm also supposed to come up with some kind of over-the-top bridesmaid outfit for myself, which I'm still puzzling over).

Funnily enough, I just checked out a copy of Susan Khalje's Bridal Couture from the library (via inter-library loan, after a LONG wait--it was NOT easy to come by):

Source: susankhalje.com via Mikhaela on Pinterest

I actually used to own a copy back in the days before it went out-of-print... but after I realized I didn't actually have the chops to make my own wedding dress, I up and sold it. Which I am so kicking myself for now, since it seems to go for like, $300 used (even though you can buy as a CD book now).

But somehow I doubt I'll be using any of those fancy techniques. Instead I'm planning to make a T-shirt wedding dress out of some extra MSF T-shirts from around the office. I actually have a pattern for one, the Tying the Knot dress from Megan Nicolay's Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-shirt...

Source: trythisathome.net via Mikhaela on Pinterest

...But I think I'll go even simpler here. The bodice will just be a tube with tons of elastic shirring and a gather to make the sweetheart neckline, and the skirt will be a separate tube of T-shirts, with a flounce in back and a red ribbon sash (and maybe an elastic?) to gather the waist. I won't bother with hemming. EASY, right?

The accessories are obvious: a "mosquito net" veil, elegant yellowish surgical gloves, a stethoscope "necklace." Haven't figured out the bouquet yet--I might just make it out of paper flowers, or maybe surgical masks?

Let's hope so, because I want to get on those Jalie jeans... and I have the Cambie dress coming in the mail... I am such a bad pattern-buying-past-capacity-for-pattern-sewing girl.

I used to be really into T-shirt refashioning, though it doesn't appeal so much these days--I'd take oversized old punk rock and thrift store Ts and turn them into darted, fitted tops... here I am in 2004 with one such:

I even once hosted a T-shirt refashioning party using the Nicolay book and it was a lot of fun, though my T-shirt transformation didn't turn out wearable (tip: use super-soft thin old T-shirts, not thick unyielding scratchy thick T-shirts).

So: do you fancy T-shirt refashioning? Have you ever made a T-shirt dress? Conversely, are you so super-fancy you actually made your own lovely wedding dress (NOT from T-shirts)?

P.S. Bonus photos: Masheka rode in the 42-mile TD 5 Boro Bike Tour on May 6, raising $1,370 for MSF in the process. Here's little Ms. Z hugging her daddy halfway through the ride:

And here's a photo of us from last year heading out to an AIDS rally with the MSF office. We were protesting in support of scaling up access to AIDS medications for people living with HIV worldwide. I made Z a matching onesie with an iron-on T-shirt transfer.