A funny thing happened on the way to the craft show

With a different belt!  This was
just what I had within reach.

I made a dress.  For me.

This is a momentous event, because I haven't done that for quite some time.

It isn't a complicated dress, but it still sat on my workroom table unfinished for the better part of two weeks.

It isn't a complicated dress, but I liked the pattern so much I made it in a Liberty cotton that I've had sitting for several summers.  It's cool and airy and I love it.

The pattern is Simplicity 1609, and I noticed it a while back on Gertie's blog.  I'm glad I read her review of it, because this dress does not have the Big 4's usual excessive ease.  I'm usually a 12 in Simplicity, etc., but I went by my measurements this time and I'm a 14.  I know it looks a big spacious on the dress form, but that's because Evelyn's back isn't as wide and she's somehow not gained an inch or so in the chest where I have.  We won't even discuss her refusal to adjust her waist measurement to mine.

I skipped one step in the pattern -- deliberately because of insufficient fabric, and because I didn't think it would make that much of a difference.  There's a center front seam on this dress, and instead I cut it on the fold, leaving off the excess which would have been the seam allowance.  There didn't seem to be that much shaping to the front seam, and I didn't have quite enough fabric to cut separate pieces.  Next time I'll follow the instructions, because having that seam really would give me the ability to tweak the fit a bit more, but since I wanted this version to be looser and less fitted, it worked fine.

The darts on this pattern really make a difference in the fit.  Even though I like shift dresses, they tend not to be the most fitted things in my wardrobe.  (Yes, Simplicity is calling this an A-line dress, but we can agree to disagree, can't we?  It feels more like a shift when I'm wearing it.)  This has two darts in the front and one in the back.  And if I'd kept that center front seam, who knows what greatness I would have achieved?

Hard to see the detail of the Liberty print in the full size photo

Anyway, quick, fast, cute summer dress - two pattern pieces, facing pieces, invisible zipper.  It shouldn't have taken me any time at all, but I kept getting distracted between steps.  If you need some cute instant gratification, I'd recommend this dress.  But be warned, there's not much excess in this pattern, so if you're not going to make a muslin, go up a size if you have to and work your way back down.  With that many darts and a center seam, you can fix anything - just cut the facing last, after you've stabilized what your size is!

Instant Gratification Sewing

Or, I still haven't worked on Mario's shorts. 

I had very little time to sew this weekend, and I wanted to make something for me, me, me.  I chose a quick project, because I knew otherwise I was at risk of creating a UFO.

But I chose a good fabric, because I wanted to make it worthwhile.

I know I'm late jumping on yet another popular pattern bandwagon, but better late than never, right?

Here's my version of the Colette Sorbetto top, in Liberty paisley in a variety of blues and greens, neck and armholes bound with blue seam binding.  The fit on the top isn't perfect, but it's good for a first shot. Next time, I'll change the dart - it's a little long for my personal configuration; also a little high. I like Colette patterns because they're drafted for curves, but I think their draft might still be for younger, higher curves than I have. But that's an easy enough fix, and I'm even going to tweak the one I wore today and shorten the dart so that it ends in a better place. Other than that, the fit was good - I added a little to the length, because I always do, but no morechanges except to add buttons down the front pleat, for extra interest. They don't really show well on the paisley, but I know they're there.

That's my weekend sewing for you. We did go flea marketing on Saturday and I scored a couple of really cute vintage patterns I'll share soon - the joy of finding vintage patterns with a 38" bust. Talk about fit for real people!

Once upon a time

This was a dress. It was a dress that made me look like a sack of particularly lumpy potatoes, however, I chose to forget that unpleasant fact and remember only that I didn't like the sleeves. So I remade the sleeves, tried the dress on, and all the memories came flooding back.

And the dress came off. Quickly.

And I took scissors to it before I gave myself the opportunity to do the inevitable: It's a nice dress, it's Liberty, that stuff's expensive, I'll wear it eventually, and I'll find a way to make it work. Right. I'm not that good.

The dress pieces sat around for a week or so while I attempted to locate my TNT skirt pattern, which was hiding in the depths of the workroom. I actually had pulled out a lot of my TNTs so I could trace them off onto cardboard to make for easier repeat usage, and then I lost the stack of patterns under an avalanche of fabric. Who, me, a packrat? Say it ain't so.

So . . . Sunday night I finally cleaned up my space, found my patterns and cut out this skirt. The dress pieces weren't big enough to cut the standard front and back pieces, so I did larger center pieces and narrower side pieces. I used the contrast fabric cut from the dress facings as an insert between the yoke and the skirt, and I used the inside of the tie belt as a border/binding on the bottom of the skirt, enclosing the batiste underlining left with the dress pieces. The pocket I carefully removed from the dress and reattached. Invisible zipper up the side and now I have something wearable from my Liberty, and a nice pile of scraps left over.

I wore it Tuesday with a white tank and a pale blue cardigan for my ever-arctic office. Much better than an unloved dress in my closet.

How sad is that?*

The other night, I decided that my aunt-induced stress levels could only be relieved with wine or sewing (or possibly some dangerous combination of the two).


I started with sewing. I ended with wine.

I decided not to do anything too complicated, since I was already vibrating at a frequency that felt like 2-3 glasses of that wine. I had pre-treated all my Liberty fabrics last week, and I decided to cut out the replacement sleeves for my dress. I found the wad of white batiste that I failed to fold when I put away, ironed it, ironed the Liberty, cut out sleeves and underlining for the sleeves and basted them together.

Then I sat with Mario for a few minutes and picked the old sleeves off the dress. They were cute, but they were a little too fluffy, and I don't do fluffy well. The new sleeves, even with a few gathers, seemed much more smooth and minimal. Sleeves off, pressed the seam allowances flat again, pinned on new sleeves, sewed, finished seam allowances, pressed again.

And then I tried on the dress.

And the memory came back.

Of how I didn't not wear that dress just because of the sleeves, but because it wasn't flattering. It made me look like I had no waist at all, and all the cute new sleeves in the world weren't going to give me one.

Guess what?

I'm making a new skirt out of some lightly worn Liberty fabric that used to be a dress. Photos to come.


* thanks to Andrea for the title of this post. That was her response to my email of what happened in the sewing room.

Give me liberty

What, did you think after that little bout of public enabling, I wasn't going to buy any?

I haven't bought much from Fabric.com recently.  I took myself off their daily emails and tried to forget they were there because it was just too easy.  But for Liberty, exceptions will be made. I loaded up my imaginary cart and clicked "save".  I didn't count how much I put in the cart, or worry about its effects on my credit card.  And I do, sometimes.  But I was remarkably restrained in Chicago, partly because of my late start, but mostly because I can shop anytime, anywhere. 

Talking to 100 other sewing-obsessed women . . . about sewing?  That I can't do anytime, anywhere.  So I behaved. 

I went to work last Friday and let a large black coffee clear my head a little.  The total in the shopping cart was $304. 

Yikes.

I'd picked out 6 fabrics.  Obviously, that wasn't going to happen.  I sat and considered my options, and what I could eliminate without getting the textile version of the bends.  There was a half yard that I wasn't giving up, because it's going to give new life to a dress made a few years ago that doesn't get enough wear (a half yard will allow me to change out the sleeves, which I don't like).

After that easy choice, the harder decisions.  By my second cup of coffee, I'd narrowed it down to 2, plus that half yard.  And since I'm planning shirts instead of dresses, and since the prints I'd chosen were blessedly non-directional, I figured I could manage with 1.5 yards each. 

So really, not too awful, not when you throw in free shipping and a 10% off coupon.  I got 3.5 yards for a little more than the price of 2 full price yards. 

It's a justification.  I know it.  But when is Liberty of London going to come along at that price again, and in that many prints and colors?  It's a good thing that my thrifty streak is nearly as wide as I am, or I might have clicked "buy" with that $304 cart, instead of "save."

The top 2 fabrics pictured are the shirt yardage; the bottom blue/tan floral is the excess fabric to change out the sleeves on my Loaves & Fishes dress.  Hmmm, if I had to buy more fabric to make it work, I guess I'll have to change the name - no more miraculous making of a dress out of too little fabric.

But if I wasn't wearing it, it wasn't a successful dress.  I'll wear it now.  That's more important in the long run.

It arrived on Tuesday.  It's lovely.  And it's mine.

A little enabling

For all those I couldn't persuade into fabric in Chicago (and I was actually VERY restrained for me; normally I'm a champion enabler), Fabric.com just got in a whomping load of Liberty of London tana lawn.

Major weakness of mine.  It's $28.98 per yard, which is painful but below any other price I've seen recently.  I have to narrow my choices down from ALL of them to a few.  This will be difficult, but I can't buy it all. 

Right?  Right.

It's a Miracle!

Like I said before, if I got a dress out of the 1.6 meters of Liberty print I bought in Paris, it would be a miracle on par with the loaves and the fishes, so here it is: the Loaves & Fishes dress, ever after to be called that, to the confusion of almost everyone.

I was almost done this for a very long time. After I finished the shirt, I went back to it and the skirt issues sorted themselves out immediately. Then I made the belt, pocket and finished up the sleeves. The pocket is probably one of my favorite parts, but I really like the sleeves, too.

I had button issues, because out of all the probably millions of buttons I inherited from my grandmom, two aunts and my mother, I didn't manage to have four matching vintage buttons that looked right for this dress. After much hemming and hawing, and a trip to the store to discover they didn't have anything I liked better, I went with my instinct and used some domed buttons that I think were my grandmom's - there were three blue and two tan, and I needed four buttons, so I alternated them. It's kind of kitschy, but because it's a faux-vintage dress, I think a little kitsch is allowed.

The pictures on me aren't as nice as I would like, but between self-timer and extremely hot living room, my efforts were limited because the dress kept sticking to me.

There were times I thought I'd never get this done, but in the end, it's a project I'm really glad I tackled. One of the most fun parts of sewing for me is knowing that I can (more or less) cobble together features from different patterns that I've liked and come out with a wearable dress that looks like the idea I had in my head when I started out. It was a challenge from start to finish, and I enjoyed almost every moment of it - even though it took me longer to make this one dress than it did to construct the dress, top and skirt whose pieces made up the bulk of this dress.

Part of me wants to go in and sew today, another part says I need to clean up my swamplike sewing space before I sew another stitch (the room is so messy I've lost the instruction book for my sewing machine, and since I never read it all the way through when I bought it, I like to keep it on hand), but what I'm actually going to do is finish up the demolition work on the room that's going to (someday) become a walk-in closet. It was a bathroom, now it's just a dirty little storage area, but hopefully by the end of summer it will be a nice, clean room with two Ikea wardrobes for my clothes, a dresser for the off-season sweaters and stuff and, of course, the litterboxes back in the corner behind a screen. The cats can't be inconvenienced, not even by my need for closet space.

So you can see I wasn't kidding, here's what's left of the Liberty:

The heat is on

Apparently the creative part of my brain is heat activated. The whole reason for making this shirt for Mario was because I got stuck on the dress and needed a break. So yesterday afternoon, after solving the heat issue in the workroom by installing the air conditioner I always said I didn't want in there, I did all the buttonholes - and the only one that gave me any trouble at all was the buttonhole on the collar stand, which is a matter of a small area, too many layers of fabric and not enough patience on my part.

I was so pleased about the buttonholes that I went on and did the hem. The buttons, however, have yet to be sewn on because I was going to do them last night while we were in the living room but it was too hot in the living room (the air conditioner having been put in the workroom window instead) to turn on the lights. So I browsed my new issue of BWOF by tv light and then, at about 10:00, I decided I needed to visit my dress.

Where does it come from, when all of a sudden your mojo comes back? I walked in, took a look at the skirt that I couldn't get to hang properly from the bodice, took a handful of straight pins and it went right together. I just didn't have the angle of the skirt back hanging properly, and I needed to raise the front a little more, a waist seam smack at the widest point of the hip not being anyone's best look. Within minutes, I had it basted together and it actually resembled what I had in mind all along. It did seem to sit a little awkwardly compared to my idea, but I decided that was because the skirt was flat-fronted and I needed something to define my waist. So I made a sash, Liberty on one side and tan cotton on the other.

After breakfast today I retired to my nicely cool room and made magic. I doublechecked my work from last night and the skirt still worked, so I sewed the joining seam and pressed it. Then I started thinking about the sleeves.

I'd wanted to do something with a gather that would tie into the collar, but I couldn't think exactly how I wanted to do it. Claire suggested a small sleeve from Butterick 4799 in response to my post Pattern Recycling. Thank you, Claire!

What I ended up with was a combination of her suggestion and my original idea of a gathered sleeve. I measured how far over my shoulder I wanted the sleeve to come, then doubled that measurement and cut out a sleeve-shape. A sort of sleeve-shape, anyway. I machine gathered the top back to the original 9" measurement and pinned it to the dress, which was resting comfortably on Evelyn.

Once I had the shape I wanted, I hand-gathered the bottom of the sleeve so that it lightly cupped the top of my shoulder. I checked how much fabric I had left and there was enough to make (non-bias) tape for each sleeve. Since the dress is lined with white batiste, I simply turned the rest of the armholes under and will hand-sew those seams.

Trying the dress on with the sleeves and the belt, I really liked the look but still felt that something was missing. I decided to add a pocket. Of course there wasn't enough fabric left to make a pocket, so it's a three-parter, bottom, stripe of gathered accent fabric, top, the whole thing lined in batiste and sewed to the right hip. The top of the pocket is right at the seam line, which looks more flattering than it sounds. Once it's all together, I'll post pictures on me.

I love working flat-out like that, when it's hard for my fingers to keep up with the ideas my head throws at me. I worked up a sweat sewing in air conditioning, and it feels fabulous.

Tonight, those shirt buttons, so that I can start thinking about the finish work on the dress.

Pattern Recycling

Somehow or other, I must have appeased the sewing gods, because I was permitted to get the entire bodice and skirt from the Liberty fabric. There's something to be said for non-directional fabric, because the front was cut on the straight grain and the back was cut on the cross-grain, but there's no visual difference and the fullness of the skirt back makes it hang properly.

This dress has ended up all my favorite bits of my recent projects. After using V 8352 for the bodice, for the skirt, I used the back-pleated skirt from BWOF 4/2006 #122. Because the fabric wasn't wide enough to accommodate the whole thing, I folded one pleat out of the pattern piece, narrowing the skirt by a few inches. I also cut it about 1.5" longer because I haven't made up my mind about the dress length yet. For the collar, I used the gathered collar from BWOF 3/08 #108. I extended the collar by about an inch and added a few more gathers to make it fit. I knew as soon as I made that shirt that I was going to use that collar again; I just didn't realize how soon!

For the facings, I used the contrast fabric, and I really like how it looks with the patterned collar. I found some blue fabric in my stash that was a good color match, but in the end I thought it was too much blue, and the tan seemed much less like "hey, she ran out of fabric and had to substitute." It looks more like a design choice.

At this point I have a bodice (still without sleeves) and a skirt. I've had the two pinned together in various configurations but it hasn't yet gotten to the point where it looks like the dress I have in my head, so I guess the sewing gods aren't entirely appeased.

I've taken the rest of the day off and started working on a shirt for Mario made from some of the fabric he picked out in Paris. It's cut and stitched in a chevron pattern on one side of the front and the rest of the shirt is on the bias, so it's not a walk in the park either, but once the challenging part is done it's just another man's shirt, and I can work on it while letting the dress percolate in the back of my head.

Next up: deciding on sleeves. There's almost no Liberty left, and I do want to use more of the contrast, so I have to figure out a small sleeve, almost a cap sleeve, that will incorporate both fabrics. It'll come. I also have to dig through the button stash. I have some vintage buttons that will work on this, just not sure (again) if I want to use blue or light brown.

The first cut is the hardest

I took scissors to the Liberty fabric last night. I modified the front bodice piece of V8352 to remove the attached facing and add a seam allowance. I'm not wasting precious fabric on facings - I think the warm tan I've chosen will work well as the facings anyway, and accent the floral on the Liberty rather than drowning me in too much of it. I've only cut the bodice at this point because I'm still thinking deep thoughts about the skirt. I also cut the bodice in white batiste underlining - Liberty lawn is so fine that it would just droop without any underlining, and batiste will give it strength without really adding any weight. I need to buy that stuff by the bolt, I swear, for the amount of it I use.

As far as the bottom of the dress, I just finished a BWOF skirt the other night, the petite #122 from the 4/2006 issue. What a cute skirt! It looks like a plain straight skirt from the front, but the back yoke dips down a bit and there are soft pleats in the back which add a really pretty fullness to the skirt without adding any unnecessary (or unflattering) fullness to me. My thought at this point is to use this as the skirt to my dress - the bodice of #8352 curves down almost in the same shape as the skirt yoke, and if I measure properly, I could do inserts of the contrast fabric for the insides of the pleats. I had a suggestion on yesterday's post about using a similar print for the contrast, but I think searching for a print that would work with this would take longer than making the dress. Plus if I find something I do like, I can guarantee the texture will be all wrong. In the end, much as I sometimes like looking like a walking patchwork quilt, I really don't think I want to give the Liberty competition. It might not like it.

I really doubt if I can stretch the fabric enough to do the entire skirt in just Liberty, so I need to make up my mind what I want. I think I'll do the structural sewing on the bodice tonight and pin it to my new skirt (which I'm wearing) and see how the shapes work together. If they're happy, then I'll figure out how to make the fabric work. If they aren't, then I'll do what I did for the skirt lining and fold the pleats out of the pattern piece and cut it straight and maybe be able to get it all from original fabric. Maybe. Unless I do something different.

Listening to the fabric

The next dress is starting to come together in my head. Even though I know the best use for that 1.6 meters of blue flowered Liberty would be to make a shirt from it and not try to stretch it beyond its capacity, it wants to be a dress. It told me so. The problem was how to make 1.6 meters of not-particularly-wide cotton into something resembling a dress big enough to fit me.

The answer: careful cutting, a fabric pattern that's non-directional and a contrast fabric used in such a way that it won't look either cheesy or like I ran out of fabric.

My first idea was a dress based on B 4985, which I really liked as a blouse, but even though the more numerous yet smaller pieces might be a bit more sparing of fabric, I've decided to use the bodice from Vogue 8352 instead. 8352 fit pretty well and the top half didn't take a lot of fabric. It's got a slightly dropped waist which will allow me to swap out the existing full skirt for something a little less generous. While I like the original just fine, (a) I don't want an identical dress, and (b) the full dress takes 3 yards - I can't stretch 1.6 meters quite THAT far.

So I'm going to use just the bodice, and see how much fabric I have left after that. I found a warm tan cotton broadcloth that would work with the Liberty, though I haven't completely given up on finding the right light blue. If I do the collar and the facings in the contrast color, that will tie the bodice together with whatever I have to do to make the skirt work, which right now entails making something vaguely A-lined, and possibly using vertical bands of contrast - which seems more interesting than a band at the bottom of the skirt. The dropped waist also means that I don't have to make shirt dress - I can just do buttons from the waist and keep the skirt as one piece, also using a lot less fabric.

At this point, the dress is sleeveless. If it looks like there's going to be a decent bit of fabric left after the skirt (I know, I know, I'm dreaming) then I'll find some itty-bitty sleeve to put in. Otherwise, the armholes will get banded with more of the contrast fabric.

If this works, it's going to be a miracle on level of the loaves and fishes. But with fabric.