We're making a dress - no machines allowed. [Hey, guess what?] You know, considering I started my like
"making stuff" exploration - or obsession - with embroidery, which is essentially just hand sewing
in a decorative manner, you'd think I'd be more into hand sewing. I don't know, it's kind of weird.
I spend some amount of time almost every single day working on one of my currently four long-term
embroidery projects, but when it comes to garment construction, I'm like... hand sew a hem? [Sco
ffs]
Hand sew a snap? [Gags] I feel like it's almost one of those "you told me
to do it so now I don't want to do it" kind of things, even though it's me who has told me to do it.
But guess what? I'm still delayed on finishing my studio so I can move back in there, yay!
Oh, what big boy. Oooh da booty scratches. I'll talk about it more in that video, which will
hopefully - HOPEFULLY - be out next week, but uh, basically, I need big stuff, and I have
small car. Mat has the big car, and Mat is
very busy at work (bye!) for um..... well, reasons you
can probably guess if you know who he works for. So rather than plowing ahead with one of my Tier 1
list projects and just doing it in my makeshift living room studio - oh no, too far! I thought I would
pull out an idea that I have been wanting to try for ages but have just kept putting off because
y'all, sewing machines are so comfy. And speedy. I really want to try sewing a dress entirely
by hand, which I'd like to point out is not so
me monumental thing - many people sew garments
by hand frequently or sew everything that they sew by hand. It is just something that I have never
tried before, so I don't really have a concept of what the process will be like or - more interesting
to me - how long it will take. I'm going to use this lovely light blue linen - yes, gasp, I have linen!
You know why? Because I found it at Remainders! That was rare, that was super lucky. I snatched
it up, and I have been saving it because it fee
ls like it deserves to be something special. Hand
sewing is special for me. Hand sewing a springy summery linen dress like... it's a vibe. Not
the typical vibe of this channel, but also, I am into trying new stuff. So I had to come up with a
design to do for this, and honestly, I didn't have any ideas at the immediate ready, even though I
have 50 dress designs just like spinning in my head constantly. But a lot of the designs that I
want to do are specifically challenging in some way, or I
have a specific fabric in mind for them,
and the challenge here is the hand sewing, so I don't think the design needs to be like super
complex. I also just don't have any experience really with linen. So I Googled linen dresses for
inspiration. And basically learned right off the bat that linen is super versatile, and you can kind
of do whatever you want with it. I don't want to go incredibly simple in design, because I do want
the sewing to be a challenge, but I'd also love it if I didn't
have to do any form of closure.
[Singsong] No zippers please! So here is what I drew after that research. This makes sense to
everyone, right? You can totally see my design in there? Ignore the whale tails, that's just uh... it was just a
thought that I had: tails and pockets, and I don't think that's gonna come into play here. I broke
it down a little bit more on this page, and um, we've got 12 pieces, so I said not too simple, not
too complex, and then I just immediately went and made it
kinda complex. I can't help it! I'm still
debating between flutter/butterfly or puff sleeves, so... I don't know, I might do like an Instagram poll
and let somebody else decide for me. Let us measure, guesstimate, and cut some stuff out. Actually,
I'm gonna go eat lunch first cause I'm really hungry. [What's that lighthearted piano music you'd
hear in an old-timey saloon? This music is similar.] [Ragtime!] [Clatter] Okay! Time for a sleeve decision. Mmmmmmm.... I don't know. I don't know.
[S
ingsong] I doooooon't know. Uuuuuuuuuguhbuhgeboon mmm.
[Operatic singsong] I don't knooooooow! Come over here. That one's mommy's. Thank you.
Okay, while the good people of the internet decide whether I should do flutter or puff sleeves -
flutter is currently edging out puffed, which actually might be best with this kind of fabric... anyway.
I'm going to eat strawberries and cream and write down my step-by-step process.
Y'all I ran out of powdered sugar, so I sweetened the cream with yuzu sy
rup that I found in this
really cool store the other day... That works. So this is something that I do a lot, especially
because I'm not using patterns, so I don't have the step-by-step instructions of a pattern
to follow. Mostly because I have all the steps in my head, I kind of know what I should
do, but there's also a lot of other stuff in my head, so writing it down is super helpful for
getting it out. Sometimes, I never even look back at the stuff that I wrote down, but just the
proce
ss of writing it is enough to like solidify it in my brain and make me remember it easier.
But I feel like with hand sewing this, having a written down list of the steps is going to be
even more important, because I'm assuming it's going to take a lot more time to get this done.
So you know, a lot more of like "I've slept since then" kind of moments. Are you doing sad chin?
Obviously, there's a lot of different orders that I could do this in, but I think a really
good place to start with ju
st some very long straight seams is putting the quarter circle
between the two back panels. Then I can move on to what I typically do first in anything that I
make: the pockets. I could also go ahead and make the sashes right here at the beginning - that's
just a long seam down the side, turning it right side out. Just like you do on a machine, but SLOWER.
Okay, I think I have a good idea of where to start, but before we check in on the poll - just because
I'm assuming at least one person is
going to ask - yes, I did make this dress, and no, I did not make a
video about it. The other day, I was at a stalemate on the studio, couldn't do anything else there.
I couldn't start this video yet, and I, I find myself not able to sit and embroider for like
8 hours straight like I did in a lot of 2020, so I was in this very weird place of not having
anything to do. I didn't even have editing to do! So yeah, I made a dress, and I really like it. It
is a technique that I've been wanting t
o do in a video - this like pleating together the stripes -
so this was kind of a good little experiment and the next time I do it, I will make a video about it.
But not this time. Is it time to lick the bowl? [Many, many enthusiastic mlems] Oh no, don't fall off the chair! There you go.
He's very spoiled, y'all. Very spoiled. [Kissy sound] You have a good life!
All right, we're doing butterfly sleeves. Huh. What could go wrong? Time to find out how
many layers of linen I can cut through at
one time. Oh, that's not too bad. All right, flutter sleeves:
you start with a circle, and then you cut out an off-centered circle, depending on
how big your armhole is. [Swallowed chuckles]
If only I knew how big my armhole was. There we go. That- nope, wrong way.
That is a flutter sleeve. That is everything cut out, which means now
I have to actually do it. The sewing part. [Growls] You know what? I'm gonna start with the sashes.
That feels safe and easy. I can just get those done today a
nd let all of this wait for tomorrow.
Procrastination, yay!! [VO] A few thoughts from my first moments
of hand stitching: Once I settled into it, so after like eight stitches, and really became aware
that I'm not in a hurry, I'm not trying to do the last finishing touches on a garment, and I am
in for the long haul, it became - much like embroidery is for me - quite peaceful and methodical. The only
thing that really annoys me is how often I have to rethread my needle even when I'm working
wit
h pretty long stretches of thread, but that is also the same in embroidery - I use ridiculously
long pieces of floss even though it constantly knots up and causes problems. I learned right
away that, as I have nothing to guide me quickly in a straight line like the presser foot does, I'll
need to draw on lines to follow with my stitches, or I am going all over the place, it's wavy as crap.
And I do have a question for any experienced hand stitchers out there, or anyone who just
likes to offer t
heir opinion: What do you consider a practical stitch length for these inside, structural
seams that you're not going to see? Like obviously, I could make them super tiny and perfect and
la de dah, but also, I'd prefer to not take 2 years to finish this dress, so what's a good in between?
I started with a back stitch about a half a centimeter long, and that still felt a bit longish for me, but yeah -
I'm not sure I'll be able to convince myself to go shorter. Sashes complete, they could be tu
rned right side
out, and I'll press them before I sew them into the garment, but that's going to be a while away.
Back at it tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. [Sweepingly peaceful music] So we have moved on to the front
section of the dress. I've got the pockets attached to the side front
panels, and now I'm attaching the three panels together, and it is going a
little faster now that I remembered that I can use the sewing method, or what I
like to call the slide method. Come here,
bud. Mr. Prettiness. Rather than the, um, the stab
method. Which like I'm just, I'm very traditionally a stabbing embroiderer, so I just tend to forget
that uh the sewing or slide method is an option. And it is faster. One of the main reasons hand
sewing a dress has been on my list for so long is because I have no concept of how long
it'll take me. As someone lightly obsessed with time, part of the fascination of trying any new
thing is figuring out how long will this take? Like I was so s
urprised to find out how quickly you can
do thrown pottery. On The Great Pottery Throwdown, somebody did like a demonstration or they had as
like a challenge making a one minute teapot, and like yeah, of course it was like messy, but you
could still make a teapot in 1 minute, and that blew my mind cause I'm of course coming from the
other side of the spectrum, where I don't think with embroidery a lot of people realize how much
time goes into an embroidery piece. And the more that I sew, th
e more I'm gaining this sense of how
long any given garment is going to take me to make - although granted, I am still constantly
surprised both in a, um, you overestimated and thought that this would take you way longer and
it ended up taking like one day, and um, you totally forgot that hemming a circle skirt takes a massive
chunk of time cause it's huge. I still guesstimate wrong in both directions. And it's a question I
get a lot, and I'm sure that all sewists and, quite frankly, makers
of anything also get all the time:
how long did it take you to make that? But I always feel kind of weird answering that because I don't
think many of us clock in and out of our makes, especially if we don't sell the things that we
make, so we don't need to keep track of the hours so we can charge accordingly. So I'll say like, oh
it took me 2 days to make that dress, but that's 2 days of someone who does this full time and also
has very little outside distractions around. So that's not ex
actly like a helpful estimate for
someone who's trying to sew in their free time after a full-time job or who has like kids
around the house that need their attention. On the other hand, there is the addition of time
that filming myself takes, so if it took me 2 days to make something, someone in a very similar
situation of doing it full time without very many distractions... I mean, maybe it would only take them
one day because they're not having to set up shots and um... they're not paus
ing to randomly talk to a
camera. And then of course, we all work at different speeds anyway, so there is that. Welcome back.
[Many kissy noises] But I find it really interesting to know how long it took someone to make
something in a more precise way than days - generally in hours - so I completely understand
other people wanting that information as well. Uh, clocking in and out of my makes is...
not gonna happen. Especially due to the filming thing, like that just throws everything off.
But every once in a while, when I can, I do find it fascinating to do that: to really
keep track. Who's out there? So my big keeping track of the hours piece is the Beauty
and the Beast stained glass embroidery. I actually have a um time clock app on my phone, and I very
specifically clock in and out every time I work on that piece, because I know it's going to take
me years to finish it, but it is absolutely not actually "years of work." I mean, I literally go on
like multiple month-long b
reaks from working on it at all. So I clocked in and out on the first Beauty
and the Beast embroidery piece that I did, and I ended up with 329 hours of work. Which I think you
have to convert into days in order for like that number to really sink in, at least for me. That
is over 13 days of like 24-hours-straight work, or it's about 41 days of 8-hour work day. Fascinating
stuff, right? While we're here, a little bit of an update on the current big one, because the last
video for that is pr
obably going to come out like 2 years from now: I have currently reached over 400
hours of work. Good times. Anyway, all of this to say, time is fascinating. The amount of time it takes to
do something is fascinating to me, and that's why I wanted to try hand sewing an entire dress. Not like
some historical gown or something big, but just a, a normal, modern style dress, like what people would
be sewing on a constant basis in these modern times if style had progressed as normal but sewing
m
achines had never been invented. God forbid. So I'm clocking in and out on this dress, because it could
take me, I don't know, a week. Or it could take me 2 months. We're already at like 3 days... Gah. Wouldn't
it suck if I did all of this and then it didn't fit? [Very, very peaceful piano music] [Record scratch] So this is where we've landed.
Um, back of the dress: done. Top of the dress: done. All I have left to do is attach this
front part to ze dress and hem the whole thing, only wouldn'
t you know it, it's too small!
[Panicked inhalation] Um I have no idea what happened - I'm gonna blame like my brain being
all sorts of weird places when I cut this whole thing out, but like every single panel here on the
front should have been like 2 inches wider. Which is making me think I didn't put seam
allowance on them maybe? Ehh. Hard to say. So yeah, it's landing here, and it should be landing,
you know, here. [Tongue clicks for emphasis] So I'm just going to go get creative with th
e very
little fabric that I have left. [Inhale and mouth fart] [Unintelligible noises] Piecing? Fun piecing?
Totally a design choice piecing? [Nervous fake laughter] Totally! Design choice! [Back to that peaceful piano as though nothing is wrong] [Music like you'd expect to hear at a traditional ballet] [Seriously, I think I used to do pliés to this music in ballet class] Yay, I'm done! [Happy claps] Oh y'all.
You come to join me? This is just what we do lately, apparently.
He's very into st
anding on my boob. Uh, the new new glasses have arrived to replace the ones
I broke in last week's video. The dress though: it's very comfy, it's very pretty, I'm quite
pleased with it, even with my whoopsie-daisy, it-doesn't-fit. I had to get quite creative, and
then I was like, you know what? While I'm doing that, why not just throw a few extra pockets in
there? So now there's just mismatched pockets. I didn't want to do the same kind on each side.
I don't really know why. It makes the dr
ess quite unique, and I am cool with that. But my main
focus was the time. I have been working on it for 10 days - not as bad as I kind of was assuming
in my head. I was kind of expecting at least 2 weeks, so... cool. It took me about 3 hours to do the
initial designing and cutting out of the pieces, and then there were an extra 2 hours when I had
to cut out the extra, uh, side panels, so overall, 5 hours was spent cutting out, not really sewing.
That would have been the same whether I was
using a machine or not. 47 hours were spent stitching,
and that also includes like pinning and ironing seams. 47 hours. Uh, the longest I worked in one day
was almost nine hours. I worked almost nine hours in one day sewing on this dress. Woo! And then the
shortest was, um, less than 1 hour. There was a day that I was working a background job, and I came
home and got like a little less than 1 hour of sewing done. So yeah, what does that tell me? Not
much. Really, not much. There are so many
variables within that. You know, how many pieces I had to
sew together, the fact that I was doing French seams. I chose to make all of the visible stitching
including the entire hem, the hem on the sleeves, the top of the pockets, around the neckline -
all of that, for some reason, I just decided to make it a split stitch, which just takes a little
bit longer to sew than a back stitch will because you got to get it between the two threads and
all that. So yeah, like there's things that slo
wed me down, there's things that were maybe faster:
overall, that doesn't really tell me anything scientific. But it is still fascinating to me. Like
that's theoretically 6 days of full-time work, 6+, to make one single dress. I'll be honest, I
thought it would be more. Cool! Um, am I going to be hand sewing dresses again in the near future? No.
No I am not, y'all. Sewing machines are great. Also the problem that I ran into is... I've gotten really
good in the last year or so at separating m
y work day from my relaxing time. I've gotten a lot
better, because I don't take weekends off, I work 7 days a week, I've gotten better at making myself
stop work around like 6:00 every night, have dinner, and then spend the rest of the evening either with
Mat if he is home or doing like hobby work, which is embroidery, sewing on one of my embroidery
pieces. But because this was all hand sewing, I just found myself sitting on the couch and
continuing work straight into the night, until it w
as bedtime, because I was like, I don't want
to switch from hand sewing this to hand sewing embroidery. So I think that's honestly the thing
that makes me not want to hand sew on garments at all - it's because my hobby is already hand
sewing, the thing that I do in my downtime to relax is sitting there and slowly stitching. So
if I take that activity, and I turn it into what I'm doing for work, then it kind of spoils the
hobby, and now I don't have that anymore. That makes sense to me. I -
yeah - I'm going to go back
to embroidery being my relaxing thing at night, and uh, sewing dresses on a sewing machine. It was a
fun experiment though. If you do not have a sewing machine, and you want to start sewing clothing, it
is freaking possible - go for it! You can do it! It's gonna take you longer, it's gonna take some
time, but it is 100% doable. You definitely have an appreciation for the finished garment when you're
done, cause it's like, I invested some time in that. Also, guess
what I did not finish in the course of sewing this
dress? That's right, I didn't finish my sewing studio, yay! You cannot see it, but there is a puppy standing on my chest
right now. Ouch. Ouch! You have stabby little paws. [Singsong] Trash day! Don't be lumpeeh. Yer sho shtinky! Ah. I thought I would pull out an idea- nope!
Oh god, come back. Oh, I already failed on that hard core. Voiceover for hand sewing a dress. Hi puppy! You're so cute, do you wanna come here? Look at that butt. He is no
w piling his toys on top of me. [You're one freaking cool human being!]
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