The Fuchsia from Hell

My last choli post mentioned that I was busy this weekend. A few reasons why, but let's discuss the interesting ones.

For this post, let me introduce the next project via its fabric, a huge piece of fabulous fuchsia, and the issues that said fabulous fuchsia caused.

The fabulously and fantastically infuriating fuchsia fabric

Unlike many of my silks that are just laying around in one to two yard pieces (leftovers from a time when they were used for "sample swatches" when there was long ago a dance dress company running from my home) this brilliant, yet absolutely obnoxious fuchsia is notably more.

I believe it's almost 5 yards (I've not gotten around to measuring it... I probably won't until I begin to cut it), which means that at one point, someone wanted a dress made out of it, but never went past the down payment. (Common in the Irish Dance dress industry, where dresses can be thousands of dollars and take months to design and be approved, and by time the approval is done they've found a better deal, the kid has grown too fast, or they decide they don't like the design anymore. Yeah, I made Irish Dance dresses **sigh** it was a family thing.)

So now I have it, and it's PERFECT for a recreation of a Late Ottoman entari like this one.

The place I had originally found this labelled it as a Bindali, but it's not.
  

So here's the color in a historical example, I managed to get VERY lucky and find not only trim that matched the pattern of the trim on this one, but I also found some BEAUTIFUL vintage beadwork, 4 panels in fact, on a similar enough background color. so that the silk doesn't look so "plain"   

Ooooh, pretty. And once the excess is cut off and it's attached, no one will notice that one is hot pink, and one is fuchsia

And then came the misfortune that is trying to match thread.

For those of you who don't sew, it's hard to imagine that they make fabrics in colors that threads do not come. But they do. Fabric manufacturers pay little heed to thread producers, and vice versa, and prefer to produce whatever colors are "in the same ballpark".

Add to it this fabric must be almost a decade old, so there's age to tweak the color, and the simple fact I bought it in LA, not where I am now, so I have to suffice with JoAnn's for notions (not that JoAnn's is bad, in fact I love them, but they often get the brunt of my anger when I can't find something).

Incidentally this all brings up another thing.

Dye lots.

See, just because the color says its the same, comes from the same manufacturer, etc. DOESN'T mean it's going to be the same color. And the reason is dye lots.

It's the same thing for buying house paint. You HAVE to buy all your house paint at once, right? Because if not, then you run the risk of having the same color, but not. Well, thread works that way too. You have to all have the same dye lot or else the colors don't match up entirely right.  

So I'm at JoAnn's, my poor fiance is sitting there looking through pattern catalogs trying to pass time/ be helpful in finding Victorian/Steampunk patterns on sale (bless his heart) and I'm stuck staring at this god awful fuchsia in its bag trying to find something just in the ballpark of the color. 

It really seems like there's nothing. Even Sulky, who I can normally count on for being 1. expensive and 2. having the color I need, doesn't have anywhere near it.

Finally I come across a Gütermann thread that I feel can do the job. It is the closest I can find in color, and even though it's for machine embroidery, well, the robe is silk and muslin, so the thread isn't expected to do MUCH more than the durability required for being strung through a machine and used to embroider. 

And then the horror that is dye lots decides to rear its ugly head.

That's right. There's only TWO spools of thread in the "matching" color. The others, they're not really close. In fact, if I had seen the others first, I would have given up and sewn the fabric in something so outlandish it'd look intentional.

So I have to decide; two spools only and potentially run out, no spools, or suck it up and get the remaining ones as well, since I won't have better luck anywhere else.

Oh, sure, these all CLAIM to be color 5335, but they're not!

I suck it up. It's such a small issue, and I don't have the brain power to deal with it without complaining to the poor workers who can't do anything about it.. It's thread. I did the best I could do with what was available. 

I know someone will inevitably say "why didn't you try online?" and the fact of the matter is that while somewhere in the world that thread may exist, the chances of finding it online are next to nothing. Monitors display colors differently; chances are you're not seeing the difference in color here the same way I see it in real life, if you can see it at all. But it's a BIG difference, trust me. What may seem like the perfect match may come back to me more off than the ones I found in the store. It's just not worth the risk.

So there's that.

Anyhow, on to make the entari. I'll put that in it's own post.