Podium Girl for Hire

Vive Le Tour!

I haven’t been writing much of late because two things happened.
1. The Tour has been on TV for the last 23 days in a row.
2.) The commencement of the 2009 Tour de France coincided with what appears to be the official beginning of summer weather here in New England. On July 4 the sun finally came out and has pretty much stayed out (give or take a couple of days) ever since. Summer weather meant more time spent on my bike, and I went from trying to squeeze in a 90 minute ride between rain storms or pushing through a miserable set of LT intervals on the trainer for an hour to riding 3-6 hours a day. When I don’t ride much I have more energy for other things, like sewing and blogging and actively making fun of people on the internet.

When I do ride my days looks pretty much like this:
5:00 am – get up. drink coffee. eat toast.
6:00 am – get on bike. ride
10:00 am – finish riding, shower, eat lunch, rest, clean the bike, do laundry, clean the house.
5:00 pm – eat dinner, read Thesuperficial.com
7:00pm – watch the Tour
9:00pm – fall asleep on couch during boring parts, wake up to the Schleck brothers tagteaming Armstrong, eat some ice cream while I watch the stage finish.
11:30pm – bed

So, there was not a lot of other things going here over the last three weeks. I did, however, plan, design, and finish sewing my Official 2009 Tour de France Polka Dot Jersey Podium Girl Dress.

I waited for the Tour to start before I began designing my dress. I didn’t want to base it on a previous year’s design. It took a while for me to execute it. First I had to find the right kind of fabric, and a very nice reader in the UK pointed me towards a website that sold white fabric with giant red polka dots. Unfortunately the only white with giant red polka dots fabric that I could find was plain old 100% cotton quilting fabric. Great for making pillows and crafts, but not exactly…fashionable. Fortunately I had some ivory stiff satin lying around that I used for a lining.

I let you, my readers vote on which pattern I should use, and I decided on the one with the fewest votes since it looked the most like the dress that the podium girls were actually wearing.

McCall's 9746

CYCLING-FRA-TDF-2009-VEIKKANEN-PODIUM

The official Carrefour Maillot du Pois dress was designed by Agatha Ruiz de la Prada (no, not that Prada). She is a Spanish designer. Most of her designs from her spring collection are, uh, interesting, to say the least.

To be honest, I was not in love with her design for the Tour. The skirt was a bit too puffy, and the bow was a bit over the top. The hair bows/head bands were just plain silly. But, I said I would sew a Polka Dot jersey podium girl dress, so I stuck with my promise.

My original plan of using a pattern went out the window when I realized that it would need to be completely redesigned and redrafted to get the skirt to hang properly. My pattern had no sash or bow, so I had to design that myself too. My pattern also did not feature a lined dress with a crinoline/petticoat/call it what you want, and I knew that with this fabric and design an underskirt would be necessary to get it to puff out at all.

I decided to shorten my skirt to above the knee length and make it considerably less puffy because I needed to justify making this dress, and having something that I could legitimately wear out and about without looking like Minnie Mouse seemed more important to me than knocking off an exact replica of the Prada dress. When I started planning the dress (during the first week of the Tour) I was not aware of the matching little red jacket that the podium girls got to wear during some ceremonies.

Dress and Jacket by Agatha Ruiz de la Prada

When I finally saw it I initially though “I won’t make the jacket.” But then I started trying to figure out how I could do the jacket as well. I had enough leftover red fabric from the bow (I bought 1.5 yards thinking I might screw up more and I got it right on the first try) so I decided to try and make the jacket. I found a suitable pattern in my stash (an Advance suit from 1956) that would work and I whipped out the jacket in about 3 hours on Thursday. Then I ran out of red thread so I didn’t end up hemming it until today…the final day of the Tour.

And here is the finished product:

Podium Girl Dress and Jacket

Contrast and Compare

Side View - reasonable fascimile of the real thing

Dress

another view of the dress