Count Down- 2 days!

Hello All,

 So now we are at 2 days till the wedding and I thought I would give you further updates on the dress.  This post will be in regards to hemming silk.  I don't know who out there has ever hemmed silk.  But those who have will understand my pain.  It took me about 6 hours to hem the dress.  I did it all by hand, doing an invisible hem to the best of my ability.

For starters, silk doesn't like to fold or do anything but lay flat with the occasional wrinkle..  Secondly it is super delicate and is easy to pull apart the weaving.  Both of these issues were major contributes to my wanted to throw the dress out of the window.

The hemming started with Kelly standing on my old, wooden, toy box for about 45mins, heels and all.  Lucky for me her job is a lot of standing and she is used to it.  i sat on the floor in front of her and slowly folded up the edges and pinned them.  This went on and on.  Finally her toes started to lose feeling and we decided to call it quits for the night.  I had finished half of the skirt anyway, I figured I could use that as a reference when pinning the other side.

I don't think I will be making this mistake again.  The next morning I woke up bright and early ready to start on the dress.  I was thinking, I should be done with this in about an hour, no sweat.  Well I was attempting to finish the hem while it was hanging in my closet hook on hanger.  The dress being as flowy as it is hangs much differently when it is on a hanger. Also because there is alot of material to the skirt it is hard to tell what is where and what to compare it too.  I slowly made my way around the hem, carefully comparing it to the other side best I could.

The other issue I was having was the hem was either rolling into a tube or was trying to twist and looked like an umbilical cord.  Was furious when I saw this start to happen.  I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong.  However when I pulled it taught it was fine.  I think it was doing this because I was pinning along a curve.

I eventually made my way around the whole dress and then it was time to iron the hem.  Now, if you have ever known any seasoned seamstresses, they will tell you that silk is the hardest fabric to press.  I was worried about ironing directly on to the fabric.  So I set my iron on low, the silk setting and tried it out on a scrap.  I have to say it was unimpressive.  Didn't really make a mark on the fabric, but also did nothing in the way of irioning out my tubular hem
.

I did come up with a great way to remedy this problem though.  I had a scrap piece of canvas.  So I lightly sprayed it and put it on top of the hem fold.  Then ironed on top of the cavas.  It was like night and day.  I finally got a fold.  I think it was a combination of pressure and steam that finally made the silk give and iron out.
 As you can see in the picture, the tube is gone and I am just left with a nice clean edge.  I suggest testing this out on a scrap before on your garment. Some silks are more temperamental then others.Well that is it for now.

I am not sure when I will be able to post more.  I will try to tomorrow.  But until then here is a little teaser.

Happy Sewing
Nikki.