Zesty Latex

I thought a good place to start this off would be to talk about my favourite thing I have made to date (and that's including non-latex!)

I call it, The Green Dress

Yeah I know, I need to work on my naming skills, it's a recurring problem beleive me. This dress came about when my future sibling in law invited us to their birthday party at the local queer club. At the time I was regularly working away from home a week at a time, and it was while I was away I decided "yeah, let's make a dress for that" which was promptly followed by the thought, "guess I'm only going to have 2 days to do it" and such a challenge was born.

The Challenge

I was starting kind of from scratch with this one, but also had some previous projects to pull parts of. First question was what kind of dress did I want to make, and being me, I love the skater dress style so that was an obvious choice, full circle skirt, form fitting top with little sleeves and a nice cut out considering it was designed for clubbing 😉

Circle skirts, now that is easy, it's litterally just a circle (guess that's how it got it's name huh). Just have to figure out waist measurements for the inner circle size, and then work out how long you want it to sit and do another circle that amount further out, simple right! With the size of the skirt compared to the rolls of latex, it does have to be made in a few parts that are joined to be the full circle, but that's easy as pie.

The Top of my Problems

I had been struggling to figure out proper form fitting tops for a while by this point. I'd been wanting to make ones with what is called a "princess" cut design, which fits much more form fitting under the boobs and then expands to fit them in. Previous patterns I had used were just straight across with no added room, so you tended to get a 'bridge' above and below them where the material stretches out. As you can see, a lot less definition around the chest and it tends to just compress it, which is both uncomfortable and just less visually appealing. There was however one thing I'd made recently successfully with a princess cut, and that was a blouse pattern I slightly modified (Happened to be about the right size, just made it more of a shirt than a blouse) that I found on Mr Doo's Latex Primer that I've linked below, I recommend checking out that site. Making: Latex Blouse With Frill While I'd made this and it fit my pretty well, I didn't understand how to properly modify it for my needs, and because of the short time limit, I certainly wasn't able to get my head around it properly in time. So I did what any person would do, and just used that pattern for the top, I knew it fit and only needed small modifications to make what I needed.

Masses of Modifications

So I now had the 2 base pieces, but they don't quite make the dress I had in mind yet do they? so we have to start modifying! How does one start with modifying this you might ask? well dear reader, you start..... by putting on latex! Ok but actually, I put on the shirt I mentioned in the previous section that I had already made and an old circle skirt I already had. This allowed me to have a better idea of what I would achieve (I can't picture things in my mind, so I tend to be more physical with it.) The first things I notice, this skirt is old and doesn't fit well, but after that I decide what I'm going for here should be longer. My thoughts then wander onto the boob cut out, how do I want it to look? how do I translate that into the pattern?! well, the easy way to figure it out, just sketch on the top of the same pattern you're already wearing! As you can see here my drawing ability is not exactly symmetrical, so I drew an arrow to the side I felt was more what I wanted so I didn't get lost at somepoint in the process. I work with digital patterns, I learned a long time ago that I can't hand draw them and make them even. I even spent a lot of time and money building a laser cutter to make my digital patterns work better (oh hey another blog post idea.) I already had the digital pattern of the top from before, so I just had to figure out where my desired cut out modifications fall on the digital version and put them in. At somepoint I would have decided on a colour I wanted to make this in, I think it might have been while I was still at work days before I actually started figuring everything out. What I had chosen was the lovely metallic green I had from Radical Rubber, I think it was because I had this colour sitting around for years and never really used it. While pulling the material out of the storage cupboard, I had the idea of putting a trim on the dress, but what colour should I pick? Find out in the next episode of... okay well just later on in this post 😝

A Cut Above the Rest

With the patterns made, it was time to start cutting, and here is where I introduce you to my baby Laser-Inator Here she is cutting out the start of the dress, one of the 4 segments to make up the circle skirt. She diligently worked away and cut all the pieces out so much neater than I could have by hand.

I started by assembling the front of the top. Now something you'll notice if you look closely at a bunch of my designs is that I always try to make my seams go front to back, I don't always succeed at this, but I feel it's a little detail that just makes it look a bit nicer. You can also see me using tape to help stop the latex from curling while I'm cleaning and gluing it, I find myself using this technique less these days, partially because I just don't want to use plastic like this. So if anyone has a good kind of compostable tape for this, I'm all ears. While it was sitting on the mannequin like this I had more of a look at the trim. Another great part about digital patterns, is I can make a trim that perfectly matches the edge, and is a consistent width from it the entire way around. So I made one for the neck area and tested it out, I was happy enough that I stuck it on at this point. I then moved onto assembling the back ready to join onto the front when I get to it. I happened to take a nice photo of the pieces laid out, presumably I sent it to someone at the time!![[Pieces.jpeg]] All the trim was added while it was in these separate pieces as it's easier to do it while it can still lay flat. Not impossible to do after, I just decided that was the order of operations for this project. The keen eyed among you may be able to spot the colour I went with in the end too. After assembling the 2 halves of the top I made, and the 4 pieces of the skirt, I had a tshirt and a skirt basically. I tried them on at this point to figure out where I wanted to cut the shirt length wise to attach the skirt. This is something you'd usually plan further ahead, but with time constraints and jury rigging an existing pattern, this is how it all fell into place, this caused some issues we'll get too later (am I saying that too much?) I cut off the shirt at the desired place, went to glue on the skirt and found that my patterns, being different, didn't actually match one what I needed to glue to each other. When this happens, I tend to just make do, stretch the shorter one out a bit as needed. It makes it look not great when not worn as it's all bunched up from trying to retract it all, but when wearing it's not that noticeable. For this dress, about 6 months later that did cause an issue with a tear forming because of this, so I ended up adding a triangular patch to make it all match up better, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. Also hey, guess I got to covering that issue pretty quickly, neat.

At this point, it was all about done, I had spent a day and a half from actually planning the design until I was at this point. I wore it for a bit and revelled in the glory of what I made, and then took it off, hoping I had enough time for it to properly dry after the washing and shining I still needed to do before the club that night.

The Night of the Club

Thankfully, it did have just about enough time to fully dry so it was all shined up and ready to go for that evening, I guess it helps that clubs always start so late, why is that? I can't stay up as well as I used to! When we got to the club, we hung out in the lobby for a while, waiting for everyone to arrive. Eventually we moved on into the main room and I was not prepared for what happened next. When I walked in, this one girl saw me and her jaw literally dropped, I don't think I've ever seen that happen before and yet here it was, about something I had made. I think that's about the best compliment I have received on my work, and no words were exchanged. Throughout the night I did have a few more people come up to me and compliment the dress, some asked if they could touch it as they hadn't actually seen latex in the wild before, and some touched it without me even realising they were there. Don't do this, be polite, ask if you can before you show up behind someone and start touching them, chances are for me, I'll say yes. The night went on and eventually my feat started getting sore in those boots, but hey, it was worth it, it was a killer look.

All in all the best night I've had clubbing, the best item I think I've ever created and just a wonderful set of memories. I've never managed to make anything as good, as quick before or since so I think that part was a fluke. It definitely had some issues, some I've mentioned some I haven't (just super minor) but hot damn did it look so good.