Adventures in sewing... (some nudity)

For a bit of a prewording to set the general mood, a awhile back I was really wanting to get back to my little storage box project, also in relative high spirits at the time, it turns out that the thing wants to troll me everytime I get back to it. last time it had warped because of the laquer causing a refettle and loss of motivation ... now a few months later it had straightened itself out, now needing to undo the adjustments from last time.. which I did, and lost motivation again though I did manage to put in the first bits of interior to it...

So I decided to go back to practicing something that I more or less suck at... which is sewing.

And the goal was to ape and reverse engineer a few things that had either deteriorated, or I have wanted for some time, but cant manage to get... because finances.

The top in question people should reconize as the photos go along... but I guess I could just come out by saying its based on one of the TC-Doll outfits they still sell ... the thing with this is, that like most things they still sell, it has a design quirk which I dont really like, which is the open back... so naturally I thought I could at least try to make something similar myself.

So I needed something as a base to start with, and I took out the "Your first maid outfit" book, which ironically I've never actually completed a single complete thing out of ... but it had a nice starting point for the main top body, which ended up something like as a proof of concept:

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Something also worthy of note, was that I also switched to using cardboard templates to transfer the cutting lines onto the fabric, and also the dart lines... which actually has been a bit of a revelation that I owe watching some old Mark Evans "XXX is born" stuff where an upholstery house used similar methods.

The thing with the maid-outfit book is that its still for L-bodies at the minimum, and I wanted a form fitting M solution, so some nips, and tucks, and whatnot other things and we ended here:

This is also where I tried using satin ribbon for some of the details, which isnt too bad of an idea overall.

next up some evolution happened, and I decided to split the front piece into two separate pieces, because the dart in the arm pit was starting to annoy me:

also in this evolution there was some fiddling to the sleeve top where it attaches to the body it was also shortened from the first iteration and made a bit more loose on the arm, also I dug up my patent solution for the collar for this sort thing from my bathrobe sets just for lulzies:

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and a side by side difference between the two:

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And this was when the tumbling down the rabbit hole began, and suddenly I was moving the shoulder line outwards, I wanted the main body to tug underneath the boobs, While I liked the shorter lenght, I didnt like it showing the body split line so it need to be elongated, I got annoyed by the split line of the front pieces ending up in the middle of the arm seam, and decided to move it right up in the shoulder split line...

so after a few days I had this pile of obsolete patterns to show for it:

And test top halves:

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Also a detached sleeve option I did for fun, which prooved rather nice, and will be used in some later ideas...

So finally I was somewhere resembling a happy place with everything, so I decided to cut out the final patterns onto some posh fabric I've had laying around which I had been eyeing for the project... only to find out that while at first touch it was very pliable, it just didnt really want to turn on itself, and prooved useless... so after spending a day in farming simulator all grumpy about it, I thought back to the miko styled prototype, and decided I might as well do a "Final" version of that theme.

So far I had done the double seam when joining the pieces, but for the middle back one I was detting a bit annoyed by the one sidedness of it, and decided to try a appropreate french-seam on it, with an actual support strip underneath it:

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With the outer shell complete, I did the inner pieces without too much finesse, since it was just to hide the raw edges:

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The inners were still separate because of how I was going to make this all come together, and also add a bit of flair to the sleeves while at it:

Cutting a strip of red cotton, folding it in two, and tucking it between the ends of the inner and outer sleeve pieces:

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And when flipped:

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I layed up my patent-pending collar design and slapped it on:

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Finding ourselves at this point so far:

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It doesent look much compared to the first miko protype, but all the little adjustments make it seem a bit better.. after adding the liner it seems a bit bulky, but not in a catastrophic way.

It still needs the bottom edge sorted out, with belt loops to boot, but Im probably going to copy that from the hotpants that i've been reverse engineering that made a sneak peek in one of the progress shots ...

Anyways... To be continued...

 

 

the doll that got me into Character dolls nearly twenty years ago,

-TOYNAMI's 2001 Tenchi Muyo! Princess Ayeka Masaki Jurai-  also got me into Sewing in general.

 

it began simply because i wanted to make her better Panties than she came with, -and better shoes-

and quickly evolved to modifying Barbie clothes to fit her, and eventually attempting complete outfits from scratch.

i've been at it ever since, and have gotten pretty good at making full sets of undies

for my long-since OBITSU-based girls, (Bra/Panties/Socks/Stockings)

and also good enough at modifying/improving existing doll clothes, though i remain fairly dodgy on making full outfits.

it ain't easy, but it sure is a skill well worth trying to master as best you can.

the potential freedom of personal tastes it can afford you in regards to your dolls' fashions is just about priceless...

 

Edited March 21 by Tasuke

Well, this isnt my first rodeo in this field to be honest, Actually my sewing machine is having its tenth birthday this year (low mileage basemodel mechnaical singer).

And the first thing I was trying to make back then was a onepiece / cat-ear hood type thing for a MDD / Parabox nemurihime hybrid.. which was a bit too ambitious as a first project, especially the hood.

so far the machine has been on scale upholstery duty (and 1/1 scale clothes maintenance).

I did the swimsuits for my last Alter photo's a year and a half ago which was also a bit of a learning experience in itself, but turned out better than I expected. before that it was four years ago with a bunch of bikini's and one bathrobe.

I just have a tendancy of letting certain parts of my hobbies sit for quite some time before getting back to them... even though you really need to keep at it to really get better, and not having to then spend time reeling in the slack from the pauses.

 

So... keeping this show on the road, while enjoying some of my favorite kind of crystal method....

I came across a bit of a interesting magic trick on twitter (which tweet I have since lost...), that involved inverting sewn strips of fabric so the seam isnt on the outside..

To make this happen you need a suitable piece of tube, of which I found sitting in my junkpile, in the form of a nasty cheap AM band RC car transmitter antenna...

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Dismantling one of these gives a few options in the end width of the strips, but just for funzies and the challenge naturally I had to go to the smallest diameter from the start:

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The twitter thing was a bit more of a professional effort with a fancy hook and all, but I ended up using some mig-welding wire, that was strudy enough to manage to pull the fabric through.

I did this once before without the tube, and was stuck at a end width of 10mm, because the fabric just jumbled up on itself with inverting, here the tube stops that from happening, or if you get ahead of it, you can use it to streighten the fabric back out and continue tugging it through.

This might be an obvious trick to folks who deal with this sort of thing more regularly, I thought Id share since I though it was neat.

So now I had my belt loop material sorted, so I just had to put it on the main body with the bottom closing piece:

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For some reason I got a little conscious about not using the sewing machine to make the final closure since I had supposedly gotten this far without visible thread seams ... only to then realize I had done the double fold seams on the main body of the top... oh well.

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The end result ... wasnt too shabby ... Obviously wont hold a candle against the korean / taiwanese Sewjuitsitsu efforts, but for once I wasnt too dissapointed with myself:

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I still would have prefered to have the body shorter and a lot closer to the under bust line, but at this lenght it just about covers the basic DD body torso seam.

On the positives, the sleeve ends worked out better than expected, and also the side effect of my over complicated collar, it has a bit of levitation going on giving a bit of a airy feel around the neck

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I still probably need to add some snaps to keep the front together at the bottom, as using the belt causes it to jumble up too much for my liking.

also the belt will not be red, While it goes with the miko theme, its a bit much on the top so I'll prolly swap that out for white or off-white satin in the future.

anyways... off to the bottom bits...

It actually *really* looks great, @finnleo! 

I know how hard it is to sew such tiny clothes, but you are doing an awesome job!

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Also Neris is so hot in these pictures!