Self Directed Project National Theatre: Rocket To The Moon week 3

Week 3

Monday 7th March -11th March 2011

This week has been mainly making the nurses outfits and also making a corset for the understudy for Frankenstein which is a performance on at the National at the moment. I will also be finishing the slip for Jessica Raine for the second fitting on Thursday.

I am finding making three dresses the same quite tedious now as as soon as I finished the first one I am doing exactly the same to the second and third.

So it has been quite nice to work on the slip at the same time to have a break. However there are many challenges I have come across while using the material, the first is that the sewing lines need to correct first time as the stitch marks stay clearly in the material. also I needed to put the slip onto the stand to make sure it fell properly, pin and then machine.

once this was complete I needed to work on the top of the garment once the pleats were in place I needed to bind the top this became very tricky when it came to creating the point in the middle of the Centre Front and I had to do this again which makes the fabric weaker. sue showed me how to do this properly to get a much neater sharper edge.

I machined the top of the slip to the bottom then placed on a stand on the table and pinned the hem using a ruler to make sure this was even all the way round and left it to fall over night as the weight of the material would change the shape. when I came back to it in the morning I had to re-pin parts of the hem to make it even again. I learnt that the less pins I used the better as the are heavy and pull the material down. I then tacked this ready for the second fitting.

The second fitting went well and there were not any changes to the dress or the slip. This meant that I could machine the hem for the slip and the nurses outfit.

For the corset for Frankenstein I was given the tasks of finding the correct size binding and the correct colour threads to machine in for the boning channels.

I also had to cut the boning to the correct size as it was all on one long loop. I used a metal spiral boning as this bends better on the curves for this style corset. I then had to bind the top of the corset and the bottom including the straps.

Sue gave me this task so I could improve my binding skills she asked me to bind one side with the machine line on the inside and the slip stitching on the outside and the other side to machined on both sides so I could see which on I preferred to do in the future. machining it a lot easier however if there are a lot of curves and the material is thin and moves a lot it is much better to slip stitch.