Thai copy artists & ikat silk

My favourite pair of summer pants:

sorry very small picture

They are so threadbare that I was almost worried a copy would be too big because the fibers have relaxed a lot in the past five years of wear. I had debated copying them myself by taking them apart.  I was right to consider this an urgent matter, as later on this trip they fell apart spectacularly by ripping open across the entire bottom.

 Interestingly, the shop in Bangkok said that the tracing method is much easier than taking a piece apart.  I would assume it's less precise for some reason.

Copy number 1 is in a medium weight cotton:

Copy number 2 in silk Ikat from Bangkok:

Unfortunately I forgot to ask the guys to give me all my scraps.  I am pretty sad about that as I bought 1.5 meters.  Because of the width of the looms, thai silk is always about 1 meter wide, but I am pretty sure there was a lot left over.  The tailor cut on the cross grain to maintain the pattern and I was pleased with his pattern placement on the waistband and pockets.

Final opinion after wear:  I did this in the nick of time!  The waistband on both new versions is too big, but I'm hoping it'll shrink with a wash. It doesn't make them unwearable by any means.  They are of course stiffer than  my aged originals.  This copy project took two days!!  It cost me about $30 per pair, plus about $6 for the brown fabric.  Everything is finished nicely on the insides. I may regret asking for no belt loops because of this - I realised when they ripped that as the originals got looser they hung lower and lower on me, and fit less well. 

Unfortunately I was in a rush when I paid, so I can't tell you who the guys were in Bangkok that made my copies.  If you care, I can give you directions.  They were lovely gentlemen with good English, and they are good enough that they have clients in Switzerland and actually fly there to measure these dudes.  I think they aren't the cheapest out there - so far in Thailand there are sewists literally on every corner but I can't speak for the quality of everyone. 

Glutted on Textiles in Chiang Mai

Enough talking about fabric.  I don't usually take photos of people, of things in shops, or surreptitiously.  But here's the exception: a kaleidoscope of things I saw in Chiang Mai.  The children were all outside the Doi Suthep temple.  Because it was festival time in Chiang Mai, they were out of school and wore their ceremonial dress, possibly to try to get coins from tourists taking their picture.

Too bad I have nowhere to wear this amazing coat...

Hmong dress, modernised!

Silk Ikat, the blue pile.

More on traditional Thai weaving patterns

So in Chiang Mai I found a huge number of shops selling woven items.  Some of them come from the hilltribes in the area: the Lanna, Hmong, Karen, Tin and various other peoples.

The ikat that I discovered earlier is mostly from the silkweaving area around Buriran and Surin.  Other techniques seem to be prevalent in the hilltribes, including layered weaving and sometimes embroidery together with mixed layer weaving and ikat.  Unfortunately the shopowners with most interesting wares tend to speak no English at all.  I found one shop owned by a native English speaker, Adrian, and he was most informative.  His wares included stuff from the SUPPORT project.  From him I learned more about the SUPPORT foundation.  Apparently it is a bidirectional flow of information and products - the Queen supports the industry but to a certain degree modern design and fashion informs what is woven.  So for instance in this amazing tote bag which I just barely avoided buying, ikat is visible in the center, but the beaded decorative spirals are a non-traditional element.

On the other hand, there is Chan.  The owner spoke zero english, but did tell me that these items were made for a runway fashion show!  So this is runway fashion, hilltribe style.  A few of the tops and jackets would be wearable for daily use if you so desired, but the prices are western level, with nothing less than 150$.  (Sorry I was pretty surreptitious with my camera in his little shop.)

In many of the shops older pieces are reused - either by being incorporated into clothing or as decorative elements on bags.  I extrapolate that this is partly because the culture doesn't include as much wastefulness as in the west, but I know from speaking with some of the shop owners that many of these techniques are being lost, so the weavings have value as non-reproducible originals, and I suppose you could call them vintage elements.  One lady explained that the villages use a middleman to sell their weaving in Chiang Mai, so often jackets etc. which have been worn are resold when they aren't needed.  (I tried on an AMAZING jacket made by the Tin people, with bright pink silk embroidery, but it was 200$ and the shopowner wouldn't let me take a photo.) 

Thailand & silk Ikat

It was only my first day in Bangkok but I sniffed out the fabric somehow.  I went into the Textile Museum, which is an exhibit off to the side of the Grand Palace.  The palace itself is hugely touristed and the ticket is for everything, but not everyone makes it into the museums.  In fact, it was hard to get to the textile museum - you had to go through the giftshop.  The result is that I saw all the silks before I read about them.

silks:

Thailand has a very interesting cultural history when it comes to ceremonial clothing.  Unlike other countries in the area, there is no traditional dress.  There was up to a certain point but it seems like when the country westernised in the 1900's, clothing didn't make the leap.  When the King and Queen were going to Europe in the 1960's, she commissioned Balmain, the Paris couturier, to design a wardrobe for her using elements that had been part of historical Thai dress, including accordioned skirts and draped half bodices.  The work was so successful that it sparked a number of events.

1. She kept wearing the outfits, and so now in the collective mind, they *are* Thai traditional dress.
2. Other people started wearing them too
3. In order to support textile production in the countryside, Queen Sirikit created a foundation, named SUPPORT, which does just that - it supports the processes of silk dyeing and weaving (along with other village crafts) according to traditional village methods.  Different areas have different techniques, but ikat is a traditional technique in Thailand and is still done in the villages, although by fewer young people.

I am hoping to go see some of these villages in a few weeks.  But in the meantime I couldn't resist the expensive Queen approved silks.  The prices were relatively high.  After seeing some of the stuff sold in Firenze I've redefined 'expensive fabric.'  But for the more lightweight Ikat it was 600-900 Baht (up to 25$/m) and for the heavierweights it was 1900 Baht ($60$/m.)

I got two pieces, and put one to use right away!

Opale dress from Grains de Couture

After luck put me in Delft during the weekend of the fabric market, I had sewing on the brain.  I lasted one week without sewing: )  I ended up with about 6 meters of lovely rayon jerseys and itchy fingers...

There is a 'werkstatt' in Munich with sewing machine time to rent, but it didn't match up with my free time.  However my friend in Munich had been considering buying a sewing machine and I managed to talk him into doing it now so I could show him the ropes.  And those hopeless pieces of Opale were conveniently in the luggage I am storing in his attic, and I was finally ready to look at them with a fresh outlook.

Upon assessment, what I had done wrong:
--no SA on the neckline.
--back facing without SA, although I did put it on the dress cutouts.

I didn't cut out the front pieces - the little collar or the additional parts on the sides, because I was so uncertain how to add the SA.  And now with the dress on the floor, I still couldn't figure out how they were supposed to go together.  I didn't have the book, and so I just went by photos on the internet of the final dress.  In the end I decided to skip those pieces altogether.  I must say, even without the cuteness factor of those additional bits, this dress is great.

The fabric: from 1000Stoff in Berlin, and although it is pretty ordinary navy linen with a huge amount of stretch, it was somehow my dream purchase and was hoarded for awhile.  I wanted to make the Merchant & Mills Trapeze dress with it, but didn't have quite enough fabric.  Now I wish I had just narrowed the trapeze skirt and gone ahead - my instinct that it would have been amazing is correct.  On this pattern I ended up crossing sizes at the waist, although I don't remember what size I cut, the french sizing goes very small at the waist.  I didn't need to do that - it has a lot of ease, plus the stretch factor.  I was even able to skip putting in a zip. Also, this dress is short - I didn't shorten it and I'm 5'4".

It came together easily once I skipped the decorative parts.  I got a bit distracted on the front darts, so they are pointy. (I was talking to my friend about the sewing machine as I sewed!)  I didn't quite know what I was supposed to do with the cutouts. The facing creates a nice finish but means then you have limited adjustability.  I didn't stay stitch and so I was stuck with a stretched out neckline and I didn't have a good idea of how to best use bias tape to fix things.  My friend was completely amazed to watch it come together over a few hours of work.  Unfortunately I was stumped and I left it in Munich...where it waited over 6 months for my sewing vacation!!

So, updates are below:

 It was time to come to the rescue!  I stay stitched the neck (better late than never?) removed the weird bias tape I'd put on it, created a little tuck in the front, snipped about 1.5 cm out of the top back isthmus, and bias taped the neckline and the sleeves.  That created a fine finish at the back neck.  Probably because of my original missing SA, the armscye is a bit low and just about shows my bra.  In between the two cutouts I just sewed it down.  I know it should have something THERE but I still can't think of what - I don't want a bow as I reckon it would be annoying to lean on, but I did bring a piece of fabric with me to Ukraine in case I get bored and want to play with it.  I'm really happy with finally finishing this dress into wearability, even if I had to diverge from the nice details of the pattern quite a bit due to circumstances.

Good news: I'm learning French!  So maybe next time the pattern (hrm and the rest of the book) will go better when I can read the instructions.  I would consider sizing down a bit for another version but I reckon this one will get loads of use, as southern Ukraine is already hot! 

Grains de Couture Onyx, Renfrew, Cambie and an owl skirt!

This is a post full of the things I got roped into doing specifically for other people this summer.  I knew I was sewing for other people anyway so it wasn't much of a step to let a few of my favourites choose what they got...

First: Onyx from the book Grains de Couture.  I used this as a way of gaining some confidence on adding seam allowances to these patterns.  I messed up the Opale previously by not adding the correct seam allowances so it was nice to do something straightforward.

The Onyx here is with the neckline of Basalte - a simple sweatshirt neck.  I left the binding a bit loose because the neckhole ended up (it seemed to me) a bit small.  As most sweatshirts, this took less than an hour to sew.  The recipient seemed satisfied!

Second Emmeline-Polly top:
I had planned this for a friend from silk that she chose in Italy. We had a falling out but I decided to make it for her anyway. It is the same as my practice version in navy except that this time I rolled all the edges prior to sewing the seams.  I am not sure which way is better - when doing it this way you get discontinuity at the seams which is also not optimal.  Of course the quality on this version was better because I put more effort into it.

Renfrew from stretch silk: cut my usual size 4 without any shortening of the bodice, Sarah is smaller than me and the silk generally creates a tighter fit.  This is the stretch silk which I dyed last summer using various shibori techniques.  The colour of the dye has become a bit mixed with pink and purple along some edges.  I don't know how it will wash, and in the meantime I am waiting for model photos...

Cambie in red:
My friend G is very partial to red things and had already aquired a love for the Cambie last year. We spotted a fabric that she adored but when we bought it on etsy we accidentally got a more orange shade than initially planned...luckily she says she still likes it.  For my very slender friend I used a Cambie size 4, being a bit nervous because that is the same size as my Cambie, and while it is very formfitting, I would have expected her to need a smaller size.

The Cambie instructions are always amazing.  There were various small setbacks due to how very much I hate gathering and gathering hates me.  I was actually very surprised how normal the dress looked.  I have this weird perception that gathering makes everything puff out so much that it is terrible.  This was not so at all!  I might need to admit a tiny bit more gathering into my life...

I left the hemming and the shoulder insertion to do after seeing G - she has a sewing machine and I planned to let her finish everything, but she was too nervous to try.  I got about halfway through the finishing touches, but her ancient Pfaff was making threadnests so I took the dress home to hem.  In exchange she is knitting me amazing rainbow striped socks!!

And finally, although it was the first project planned, it is the last finished: an owl skirt.
My friend Meike and I browsed a fabric market in Berlin in February and I very stupidly offered to make her a skirt out of a meter of any fabric, despite the fact that I knew I didn't know anything about making skirts out of one meter of fabric without a pattern.  My anxiety over this lack of knowledge held things up...funny how that works.  I used the skirt piece from Lucie ("cut two rectangles 47x100cm"), french seamed the sides, hemmed, and then used what seems to my hazy brain to be a modification of the simplicity men's underwear elastic application.  I realised that I had to gather the skirt for it to fit the elastic.  I split it into quadrants, and basically it has to be gathered such that each quadrant is exactly the same length as the elastic at full extension.  Trying to sew this while holding onto everything was an adventure, meaning it's not quite even, but I am so completely shocked to have this beautiful, wearable result that I certainly don't care and I suspect Meike will be happy too.

And I am glad now to have had three recent bouts of gathering behind me as it appears I am gaining experience, if not expertise.  It ends up that it's not quite fair to hate an aspect of clothing sewing until you are proficient at it.  (ie I dislike gathering mostly because I suck at gathering and my gathers look retarded.)