This beautiful dress was co-created by lovely visitors on the mannequin in my workshop booth during Maker Faire Vienna.
May I introduce cosmos to you?
The status after Maker Faire Vienna: A tucked dress on the mannequin.
Why cosmos?
I am assuming that the bee on the pocket needs some joy and food during its life in this dress universe.
So I decided to build in hidden flowers: Beautiful flowers called cosmos (bipinnatus).
They are my personal contribution to the creation of this dress.
Now I am coming into play. The dress needs to be sewn:
Manufacturing cosmos
This dress is complex, full of ideas and abundant, sumptuous.
My intention is to make it comfortable, robust, durable and machine-washable, so that it will persist the demand of being worn a lot.
Plus I let the specific creators of each part influence my translation of the design into the production process.
A challenging task in any case. I am excited!
Finding solutions for each challenge
First of all I analyzed cosmos thoroughly to find out, what wants to be done.
Then I split the dress in parts for easier construction work.
Plus I have to find a solution for fastenings to be able to put on the dress easily, because this detail was not resolved by the designers.
Starting with the bee pocket
The pocket made of the end of a jeans´ leg with a hand-stitched bee patch seemed to be a good starting point.
This work is really about details. First I attached the cross-stitch patch by hand on the front side of the pocket.
Then I closed the pocket bottom with an invisible seam made with the sewing machine – to be on the safe side .
After that I used my beautiful original jeans yarn, which I already had harvested from old jeans to make two seams with running stitches on top of the machine seam.
For the pocket opening I made an inner placket with jeans cloth, which I sewed on the outer border with a yellow machine seam.
The outer border is left cut, without serging.
The inner border has got yellow serging and is fastened with blind stitches (= invisible).
The creation of the hidden flowers
I intend to stitch the flowers with running stitches onto the surface.
Because I am using woven fabric for the cut out flowers, I ironed them on light interfacing (Vlieseline) to prevent fraying and dissolving.
Now I am thinking about the right places for the flowers.
What do you think? Where should they go?
The second part of “Cosmos, the co-created jeans-dress *2“ is about the making of the skirt part of the dress and lifts the secret of the final locations of the hidden flowers.
