Couture Close-Ups with Charles Kleibacker: Working with Prints, 1978

Virginia enters the picture in silk Sora the dress unlined and here we are on straight grain and here our big consideration is the print if one is to do print please can we respect those beautiful flowers this silk Cyril happened to have been made by teroni in Italy and it's a very lightweight piece of fabric and I think the coloring of it and the waiter only thought of these rather vivid reds and oranges and greens and then to bring it down with those topes is what I think heads adds a special story but there is a thought when you do a print like this I feel it must be respected for instance if it looks as though this flower arrangement just fell from the sky I want you to know how long it took me to place that here on the sleeve where we cut through this flower we certainly did bad things there is a scene here to make that flower back into a real motif we took another one of these yellow orange flowers cut out this little piece of the motif faced it in black silk chiffon put it into the scene and then by hand caught it here onto the fabric so I would like to think that you never realized that we had put all of this little motif through long hours of work back in in the back here where we do have a dark because I feel of dart is very necessary for this part of the anatomy and I much prefer the dark from the neckline rather from then from the shoulder seam that to me right there where we all man or woman have these wings so to speak it works much better from the neckline that dart now here we tried to work it so we have this big motif so that that skinny little dart into the one flower really did not show up here as you see on this side I tried to work the dark so never did it go into that particular motif I worked very very hard on this neck to place those flowers so that they would never be cut and believe me that takes a great deal of time I had a rather use your unusual experience with one of the young girls who had just come into the workroom and I always take them into the showroom to let them see the fitting and she looked at it and said oh my isn't that strange how all of those little flowers just sort of aren't cut into and I said strange it took me day and a half to cut it that way this dress again unlined but again that story of how I try to respect the anatomy because here in the bust area we have a great deal of ease in other words on this part we have held in the fabric and on the yoke part or the bib part we have not had to hold in in other words I've given much more fabric where the bust is and then of course nothing where the bib is there is only an underlining in this garment at the bib which you could again revere back if you would like and at these three little pieces of the neckline there I am under lined in silk shantung and then of course I'm faced in the syrup I'd like to show you what will happen if you have patience as far as old Virginny I'm sorry we're pulling you as far as doing these skinny little biases are concerned you see how much you can get if you will cut a true bias which we will go into of three quarters of an inch wide and hand based and stretch like mad when you're stitching at the machine indeed it can be done on Virginia you saw this doubled here i'm holding the full length of it silk sura is the medium won't we please be very very careful when we're working with prints you