Week 2 - Dress 1

Material: Clear PVC

Cost Pet Meter: £2.99

Amount Used: 2m

Sourced From : Fabric Land (Basingstoke)

 This week it was my turn to buy the fabric and i thought that to actually learn something you jump in at the deep end and use a difficult to work with material and this PCV is such a pain to work with as it stick to its self and puckers all the tim in places you dont want it too.

 I created a pattern with 20 curved seams to see what would happen and i wont do it again. Trying to get the curves nice and smooth was not going to happen with a normal seam that you would sew. So, through research i learnt that in rubber clothing you don.t do the right2right side/wrong2wrong side, you over lay wrong2right side to create a layered flat seam. I had added 1.5 cm all the way round each panel so the overall overlap was 3cm which in an ideal situation is not good as your wasting a lot of fabric so i would only put on something like 0.5cm in future. It also left lots of ridges where the curved seams puckered which gives a great texture.

As with rubber clothing you would clean then glue the panels together, i thought no to that idea, and decided to see what would happen if i applied heat as i thought it would melt and stick together. To my suprize it actually worked. When heated with an iron (paper under and over to avoid stickage) the 2 layers fused together to create a strong bond with NO STITCHING!!!!

Due to the nature of the pattern i created there were seams that stuck out, and to make them visible i used black satin bias binding to create a silhouette line as with the hem and bust line.

On the back i tried a new fastening idea. A corset. which i thought would work well as it would be hard to squeeze into something tight, whereas this left room for ease.

In terms of fashion i think this is a predictable style associated with PVC (raunchy and sexy) but using the heat fusing brings it into a modern context.