Ok, it took me a long time to finally take pictures of the things I have sewn over the past weeks. For some reason, I didn't feel like posing for a couple of weeks. At last, I bit the bullet. Yesterday, I did my hair, even applied make-up and made good use of E's presence and willingness to take pictures. So, now I have four more things to show you (each in its own post). At least, I think it was four... No, five.
I'm going in chronological order. So, first up is this wrap dress:
It is made from a nice but not-so-stretchy dark blue cotton jersey. The fabric has been in my stash for quite a while and I used to have very ambitious plans for it. Violent-like draping. Something along that line.
In the end, I didn't try that. It would be a lot of work for a not very practical garment and I might even find out that the fabric was actually a bit to bulky for gathered bits (as jersey so often is).
Instead, the fairly large amount of fabric (close to 4 meters, I think) would be perfect for another idea I had in mind of a while. This dress.
By the way, I know my decision to take pictures on our tiny balcony has resulted in some lighting issues. There is backlight in all images which doesn't show the details very well. That is why I am including these. They are from the end of the shoot when E was goofing around and making me laugh but they show a bit more detail on the dress:
The design of this dress is based on a top I made years ago:
The original blog post is here. I made it using this tutorial from Studio Faro (another Pattern Puzzle), which was in turn based on a vintage pattern illustration.
Even back then, in 2014, I realized how easy it would be to turn the top into a dress by adding a circle skirt to it. However, I thought the blouse-y body wouldn't look very goor with a full skirt.
After that, I didn't think about it for years. Until some point in May when I put on the top again. This time, I started pulling at it to try and find a way to take it in a bit. This top is made from a rather unusual pattern shape so adjusting the size is not straightforward. But I found an easy way to do it.
This is the pattern as draft it according to the instructions on the well-suited blog (I believe it's supposed to be a size 38, which is a bit too big for me). My top was made exactly like this, just with a fairly short and narrow strap because I didn't have a lot of fabric. When constructed, the top has a center back seam at the bottom half of your back and one long horizontal seam which runs over the bottom ends of your shoulder blades and along the sleeves (unlike for most pattern puzzles, the construction of this top is also shown in the Studio Faro post). It is that last seam which holds the key to adjusting the fit!
I ended up cutting the pattern like you can see here, along the solid red lines. I tried it out by pinning my existing top and ended up taking almost 10 cm from both the top and bottom piece, tapering to nothing in sleeve seams. This results in a more fitted bodice and less draping at the neckline (without losing all of it). In my opinion, much more flattering.
Of course, the fit of a this thing would always depend on your shape and size, so if you are interested in making something like this, I would heartily recommend making the top first and going from there. I believe there is also a post about drafting it in a bigger size somewhere on the same blog, but I'm not sure (that might also be for the other retro wrap top).
Anyway, for this version I made a waistband which is 8 cm wide and was made from separate pieces for the in- and outside. This was needed so it would have seams at the top and bottom to encase both bodice and skirt. I also cut its length in two pieces to allow for a hole at the side to pull one of the ties through. And I made the ties in different lengths so the right place to tie the dress would be at the end of the front overlap, not at the back.
The skirt is simply a full circle, cut without seams (the fabric was wide enough to make that possible). Because this is a true wrap dress, part of the fullness of the skirt goes into creating a safe amount of overlap.
It's a bit too warm to wear this dress now, but I am pretty happy with it and I'm sure I will wear it a lot. I'm not sure it still looks very 1950's. The top does, but something about the lines of the skirt in this flow-y fabric makes me think of the 1970's. Not that I care. It suits me, that's much more important.
A few weeks ago, with the last classes taught and just some meetings left to wrap up the school year, I was looking for another sewing project. And still, I felt a bit tired and didn't quite feel up to doing everything myself (something which I usually enjoy...).
After my little adventure with the Thai fisherman pants it was time for something more girly. A dress. So, I had a look at all the pretty dresses from Studio Faro's pattern puzzles (I still miss the weekly Pattern Puzzle, even though the timing was a bit unpractical for me. It was like a regular meeting for pattern making geeks!) and quickly decided to go for one in jersey.
That still left a couple of options but I decided to go with this one:
It is from 2014 and can, for that reason, only be found on the old blog. But fortunately, it's still there!
For those of you who are not familiar with Studio Faro: it is (as far as I can tell from the blog posts and site info) a one-woman company in Australia specializing in both pattern making for fashion companies and pattern making lessons for fashion students and enthusiastic amateurs. For years, she also ran the "Pattern Puzzle" on the Studio Faro Facebook page. This meant that she would post a picture of random pattern pieces and readers would guess what it was. I found that quite addictive, and I know I'm not the only one...
And if that wasn't enough, in the week following the Pattern Puzzle, there would be a blog post showing the design and describing how to create the pattern from your own slopers. There is just one catch: these tend to be designs, ideas, experiments, not tried-and-tested projects. So there is no guarantee each one will work out well.
If, like me, you are used to drafting your own patterns, that will be familiar territory though.
Anyway, I went to work on the Jersey Ruche Dress. An interesting design idea in which you slash and spread the front and back pieces of the fitted dress block for jersey fabrics in such a way that you can line them up to form one big pattern piece. There will just be a line of gathering where a side seam would have been (the smooth side has the one remaining side seam). And there is a set-in sleeve at the side with the shoulder gathers and a kind of raglan sleeve at the other side.
This time, I didn't try to be clever and drafted the pattern according to the instructions. I just had to fudge a bit with the main piece because my jersey block probably has a bigger waist-to-hip ratio that usual. And I planned for short sleeves instead of long ones.
Choosing a fabric wasn't that easy. I wanted to use something from my stash (should always be possible, it is huge). The pattern pieces were less big than I had feared (some of these pattern puzzles and really terrible when it comes to fabric economy, again because they are just design ideas) but not every fabric would work for a design like this. It would have to have the right hand, be soft and drape well. That means cotton was out. Cotton jerseys are lovely but they tend to have a bit of 'body', a stiffness which would not work here. And the fabric had to be light and thin enough for all those gathers. Some viscose/rayon jerseys, although they drape wonderfully, can be really heavy and get bulky when gathered. Stretch and recovery were less important in this case (although don't want to use one of those knits which only every keep on growing, ever again)
But I had something in my stash which was certainly thin enough, but maybe a bit too thin. A sort of marled grey/green jersey. A mystery blend containing (probably among other things) viscose and a tiny bit of wool.
This fabric works really well with those gathers but it is a bit transparant. I picked those pictures in which it doesn't really show. It did in some of those I didn't choose. So, I guess this will be an indoor dress (I often like to slip on a comfortable dress when I come home from work, so having one which is only suitable for that purpose is fine with me). I thought about making a full lining but that felt like more trouble than this dress was worth.
I did make a sort of all-in-one facing which holds the neckline and armscyes together. I decided on that after I had sewn the outside pieces. The neckline moved around in a way I didn't like: the gathers at front and back crept up and there was also kind of issue with the raglan sleeve (I forgot what that was). I made the facing for those pieces without the gathers and stabilized it with some very light-weight knit interfacing. Sewing that in helped.
I still wonder if it would have been better to cut the neckline a little lower, or to put in denser gathering. I don't know.
Oh, and I used the rolled hem setting on my serger to hem the dress. That is often the easiest options on very flared-out hemlines, especially in thin fabrics. I had to be careful with the tension: It still had to be stretchy but I didn't want one of those "lettuce edge" hems (which are just serged rolled hems on very stretched-out edges). The result is OK but it looks like the edge of stitching is pulling a little bit if the light falls on it in a certain way.
All in all, it's not one of my best dresses but certainly not one of the worst either. And it was fun to make, the right kind of project for the time in which I made it.
