Wedding Gown Post 4 (Double Happiness)

 I have made a lot of progress on the wedding gown since my last post.  I invented a neat trick when I was adding a silk organza underlining to the bodice of the gown.
 Underlining is a fabric that is used to give body to the fashion fabric. This gown is made from silk crepe back satin. The princess seams and the upper bodice detail to follow made it important to give the silk extra body. My first attempt at an underlining was to cut a piece of the silk habatoi (china silk) that I purchased for the lining. Silk habatoi is a wonderful underling fabric for many applications, but after cutting a test piece and pinning it to the bodice I could see that it left a shadow of a line that showed on the right side of the fabric where the underlining ended at the waist. That was totally unacceptable, so I went to my silk pieces stash and found some silk organza that is the perfect color and weight.
 This is one of many reasons why I save pieces of silk fabrics. I live in a town where our fabric store will never have any silk organza. It is about a 130 mile drive to a store that carries this type of fabric. I order lots of fabrics over the Internet, but that would take days, and I didn't have days! I felt really happy to find just what I needed!
 Anyway, back to the neat little trick! Underlining must be basted in the seam allowances making it "one" with the fashion fabric. It also is important that the underlining be slightly larger than the fashion fabric, so that when the seams are sewn there is enough ease for the "turn of the cloth". Underlining that makes a garment pucker is unacceptable.  As I was pinning the organza prior to basting I placed a chop stick under the organza to give it a bit of ease. This worked perfectly, and was much less time consuming than methods I have tried in the past.
 There was cause for Double Happiness in my studio! I had the perfect silk organza. It supported the silk crepe beautifully without showing, and my chop stick method made the installation of the organza go more smoothly!

Chinese Symbol for Double Happiness