Finally!

In the previous post, I told you I would soon finish that black dress... In fact, I only finished it last Saturday and took pictures on Sunday. 

Last week was very busy with work and E was ill, all of which didn't leave me much time for sewing. 

I'm glad it is finished now. I like the skirt and I like sleeves but I'm not entirely happy about the fit of the bodice. I have used this pattern before but it was always in fabrics with just a bit more give. I checked the fit on those other dresses before cutting this one and I added little bits of room in the back bodice pieces and at the biceps. And yet, it is a bit snug in those areas. That's what I get with all that climbing I suppose...

It is not too tight to be wearable though. And as I said, there are other things I like about it. Would you believe I have never made a shirtdress with full-length sleeves before? I always thought that would just be a bit too much so I stuck with three quarter length. 

I did make the skirt a little bit shorter than most of my recent 1950's style skirts.

Interestingly, I think this dress looks a bit 1970's rather than 1950's. But I'm not absolutely sure...

As I mentioned before, I started making this dress to have something to wear with my new big scarves. I also mentioned that I usually end up wearing things like this without decoration. 

And this time may not be very different.

This is what it looks like with one of the scarves. It's just a bit too big to go with the dress, I think. Nice and warm though...

Sew slow

This must have been my longest break from blogging in quite a while... I didn't mean to do it, it just happened. 
I still couldn't figure out what to make from that flannel. I was very busy with work and social obligations. I spend another weekend climbing in the Ardennes (in the last weekend of warm sunny weather... It was great!). I was just very busy and didn't sew that much anyway...

In fact, I have done a bit of sewing during the time that I wasn't blogging. Because I couldn't decide on what to do with the flannel, I put it back on the shelf. Instead, I started on another dress, which I have been working on slowly, in left-over moments, for the past week and a half (which is not my normal kind of sewing progress at all!).

I'm making this dress, in black cotton. I made this technical drawing quickly in Illustrator so it is not very pretty but it does show the shape of what I'm working on. 
The bodice is the one I originally drafted for the flounce dress but this time, I gave it full length sleeves. I made those a little bit fuller and I'm going to add sleeve slits and cuffs. The skirt is a simple half circle with slant pockets with fold-back flaps (a very popular detail in original 1950's designs). I cut the skirt in six gores but didn't put that detail in the drawing. The center front pleat was a bit of an afterthought. When I was drafting the skirt pieces, I was a bit sleepy and I didn't realize that I had included the front overlap on the bodice in my measurement for the skirt piece. I only noticed that when I was pinning the waist seam. A pleat was by far the easiest way to fix the issue...

The dress should be finished at some point in the next week. It only needs cuffs and a hem now. When it is finished, I will show it and discuss any other issues I may have with it...

And just in case you were wondering how I went from colourful flannel to black cotton, there was a reason. This dress was planned as a kind of "background dress". The sort of garment which can be combined with other things to create different looks. Usually when I try something like that, I either end up always wearing it plain or I settle on one look and stay with that. Which doesn't mean I don't like the idea...

This time, I came back to it after buying these two scarves (my apologies for the horrible cell-phone pictures, taken with the use of a dirty mirror):

They're huge and soft and warm and a lady at my local market was selling them for 3 euros a piece or 5 euros for 2. I have looked at similar scarves before but I never bought them because I don't usually wear square scarves, but at that price, I couldn't resist. 
Now, these scarves are so big they can completely take over any outfit so I don't really have to make anything to wear them with (they look great with jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt) but they were still my reason to start making this dress. I'm not sure it will end up looking good worn with either scarf but I suppose that's a risk worth taking.