Red Knit Dress - Completed

Saying that I've been neglecting my blog would be the understatement of the year. Between completing my Master's Degree in Library and Information Science, job searching, and then acquiring and working four part-time jobs, I haven't posted since February. Since so much time has passed, I'd be lying to you if I said I had nothing to post here. I do have a few new(ish) makes. Not as many as I would have liked by now, and not enough to keep the Mistress of the Sewlutions Jar at bay, but hopefully enough to make up for my disappearance from the blogosphere.

My make from March/April is actually on the drying rack right now, so that will have to come later.

This dress was my June make. It was my first foray into knits, and I can't possibly tell you how happy it makes me. Every time I put it on, I feel good, and I almost always get compliments on it, which makes me feel even better. :) I wear it more than any other article of clothing in my closet, except perhaps the black wrap cardi I'm wearing it with today. (I must get the Coppelia pattern to make a replacement. This cardi is starting to die, and I'll be devastated when it goes.)

 

So. The red dress. It's Vogue 8787, view C with the cap sleeves from another view. I honestly have no idea what size this dress is, just that it spans several. 8-12? 6-10? No clue. I did shorten the bodice by 1 1/4", and I took in massive amounts of side and back seams. I also ditched the zipper because...knit. In retrospect, this particular knit probably could have used the zipper. But I do what I want!

I added the cap sleeves to this version of the dress to make it more work appropriate. Not that sleeveless wouldn't have been appropriate, but, well, I also wanted to make this dress a dozen times and have all of them look different. So there. Those were the only modifications I made to the dress, and it fits like a dream.

I love the interesting details on the bodice. The side gathering and the swooping asymmetrical neckline make the dress interesting, rather than it just being a boring basic knit dress.

 Also, pockets!

Onyx was fascinated by the whole photoshoot thing. Also a little miffed that I was up in his space when he was trying to take a nap.

Honestly, Onyx doesn't get miffed about anything. Ever. He's one of the most mild-mannered dogs I've ever met. Except on walks. And when there are cats. But our other dog can steal his toys, bones, etc., and he just looks at her and lets her take what she wants. In these photos, he looks more like a statue of a dog than a real dog. He hardly moved at all! :)
 

And just because when you make a full circle skirt, you have to have a twirly picture:

Sewing Book Review - The Party Dress, by Mary Adams

After my last post, I started thinking that for someone who adores books and libraries as much as I do, I don't talk about them very much. I'm going to write a little bit about some of the books I borrow from the library, and if it goes well, I might make it a regular feature on the blog. Let me know what you think!

Since I talked about The Party Dress Book on Wednesday, I figured I might as well write my first review about that book.

I first found The Party Dress Book on a shelf at Borders (a mental toast to a dearly departed bookstore...I feel so much sadness for the slow demise of so many brick-and-mortar bookstores) and found myself unwilling to put it down and unable to fork over the cash for it. When I found it at the library, I had to take it home and pore over every page.

The full title of this book is The Party Dress Book: How to Sew the Best Dress in the Room. Some people might criticize the book for containing too much fluff and not following through with enough how-to information, but I would have to completely and utterly disagree with them. I adore this book unabashedly. So much so that I might actually reach into my tiny pockets and hand over the change so I can own my own copy.

As you can see from the Contents, Mary spends a lot of time discussing her own career, where she got her ideas, and what events/things were instrumental in the development of her unique and beautiful style.

The book begins with a forward by Amy Sedaris, and it's the perfect introduction. She describes her first view of Mary's shop as "a pastry shop full of cakes dripping in colorfully dyed buttercream icings. It was a deaf person's dream."  Just look at the photo of the shop and try to disagree:

Mary spends the next 30 pages or so talking about color, which is clearly very instrumental in her own sewing. If you want the best dress in the room and you want people to notice it, the color has to be perfect. Interspersed with the text are tons of gorgeous, colorful, inspiring photos.

Remember how I said the most amazing, stunning, gorgeous dress I've ever seen in my life is on pages 58 and 66? Here's page 58. To see the details of the dress, you'll have to check out the book yourself and flip to page 66.

The next three dozen pages are all about the techniques that Mary uses to create what I would call amazing works of wearable art. She discusses French seams, piecing, quilting, applique, pintucks, ruffles, and bias strips. The woman can work magic with bias strips, I'm telling you. She teaches the technique with clear photos and instructions, then gives examples of some of the amazingly creative things you can do with them (French seams are not just for hiding inside a garment!)
 

The majority of the book - almost 50 pages - discusses sewing your own version of the dress. Did I mention there's a pattern in the back of this book? There is. Actually, there are two, and they're awesome, and I really, really, really want to sew one up. I've only been able to find one blogger who's made this dress up (check out The Little Red Squirrel), but her dress is stunning, and her posts about the pattern make it seem like the pattern is pretty well-drafted and easy to put together. My one criticism of this book is that the range of sizes of the patterns provided is not very great, since it only covers size 4 (33" bust) to size 14 (40" bust). However, I think that this book is worth the money I'll spend on it even considering the fact that I'll have to grade the pattern down slightly, and if you have to grade it up or down more significantly than I will or don't even end up using the pattern at all, I would still say it's worth it for the inspiration, information, and sheer volume of gorgeousness.

Anyway, moving on from the pattern, Mary covers the planning phase, focusing especially on fabric, and then goes on to discuss measurements, yardage requirements for different fabrics and versions of the dress, and fabric prep. Then she gets into the pattern itself, showing how to make up the dresses in three different ways. She provides thorough instructions for sewing the dress, and there are tons of photos to show as well as tell.

So. I don't know about you, but I'm definitely buying this book. Or asking for it for Christmas. I'm planning on sewing lots of cake this year, but after reading this book, all I really want is frosting. And I'm going to have some. Maybe for New Year's Eve? I think that means I should buy the book myself, since I can't start a New Year's Eve dress after Christmas. :)

The Muted Firework Dress - Completed!

Okay, so this was completed a while ago, but I haven't had a chance to take photos until now. Forgive me? I doubt many of you have been reading this blog long enough to remember the vintage dress pattern I bought last June. It's a truly adorable pattern, but something got lost in translation. Well, a lot got lost in translation. I'm not really sure how I feel about the dress I made from this pattern.

The most obvious things that have changed are the fact that I ditched the bows and significantly shortened the dress. Actually, the length is the one thing I really love about this dress. I've never been confident about my legs, so most of my clothing has been long enough to cover my thighs and sometimes my knees as well. When I made the muslin for this dress, though, I made the skirt super, super short to save on muslin, and I decided that, while 12" is too short for a shirt, I actually liked the idea of something shorter than my usual 22" to 23". I'll be shortening quite a few of the other items in my closet in an attempt to nix some of the frump I have going on. :)

Other things I changed about this pattern: I got rid of the gathering at the shoulder that happened with the bow, but I ended up with some weirdness going on with the fit around the front of the armholes. I also did an FBA, and something went rather awry with my darts. Darts and I... we're not friends right now. I look like I have two extra nipples on each breast because the darts just refuse to lie flat. I pressed them with a ham. I made sure to sew them from the widest part to the narrowest and tied off the thread to avoid the bulk of backtacking. I added the side dart in addition to the waist dart to distribute the vastness of my dartage. I checked and re-checked the angles, and they look right to me. Then I pressed the darts over a ham again. And again. And again. Any advice about fixing darts? I'd like to try this pattern again (with some changes), and I want to avoid this puckering dart thing. I had the same problem on another dress I started (and didn't finish) last winter, so it seems to be a pretty regular issue for me. Is it just that my bust is too large for darts, and perhaps it's time for me to give it up and try a dress with princess seams? Or am I making darts for more bust than I actually have?

After all those changes, I decided that altering facings would be a little too much effort, so I made some bias tape and used that to face the neckline and armholes.

The last thing I changed was to raise the zipper all the way to the top (it's a side zip), to make the dress a little easier for me to get into. I hand-stitched the zipper, and it warps a tiny bit when I'm standing in certain positions, because I sewed it from top to bottom on both sides, which is the opposite of what Susan Khalje says to do in her Couture Dress class on Craftsy. Whoops! I hadn't gotten to that part before I did my zipper, though, so... next time! You can hardly see it, though!

After a couple of washes, I am having some problems with the innards of the dress. I French-seamed everything that I could, but you can't exactly put a French seam in a dart that you're supposed to slash and spread. I hate slashing and spreading darts. How are you supposed to keep these things from unravelling like crazy? And how are you supposed to get them to lie flat?!?! Obviously, I had some dart issues.

The one thing that I think went perfectly with this dress? The fit of the back. Love it. I didn't have to change a thing about the back.

And because I know you all like to see the insides of garments, here's the hem. You can see the French seam for the side seam, and I hand-stitched the hem tape in. Time consuming, but you can't see a thing on the other side.

Blogtoberfest and On My Table

Today is the first week of October, and I'm participating in Blogtoberfest again. Yay! This year, I won't be posting every day. I'm a graduate student, and I really won't have time for that. :) I will, however, be posting three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), and on the last week of October, I'll be hosting a giveaway. I'll announce the giveaway on Friday, October 26, and I'll announce the winner on Halloween.

I've missed my blog. I've been trying to keep up with all the blogs of the people I follow, but my comments have been waning lately. I have a finished dress to show you all, but it'll have to wait until I have a little time to make myself presentable for photos. Don't worry, though, it'll be soon. I have some questions for you about darts!

But in the meantime, I'm working on a new project. 

Yup, that's Vogue 8648, the dress from Susan Khalje's Craftsy course The Couture Dress. I've traced the pattern (although I think this is the last time I'm going to do that...from now on, I'll just be drawing in stitching lines to avoid cutting into the pattern), pinned it onto muslin, and cut out the muslin pieces with lots of room to spare for the inevitable FBA. And that's my grandma's yellow-handled tracing wheel. I love using her things. :)

The fabric is a navy and white linen blend from JoAnn. It's mostly linen with a little...lycra? spandex?...in there for a tiny bit of stretch.

I'll be doing View A, and I think I'm going to lay it out exactly like they did, with the side panels on the bias to provide some extra ease of movement.

Everyone has to get their inspiration from somewhere, and this dress from JCrew has been on my inspiration board for a long time.

Are any of you participating in Blogtoberfest this year? What's on your sewing table right now?

The Boho-Chic Ann Arbor Sun Dress - Completed!

The little taste of a photo I gave you back in April was a tiny piece of this gorgeous dress. I was happy with this dress every step of the way. It's a total Frankenstein of a dress. I used the bodice from Version C of New Look 6557, the midriff band from Simplicity 2886, and a skirt I cobbled together on my own.

So, in the style of Sew Weekly, the facts:
Fabric:   upcycled polyester from a maxi dress, underlined with white cotton batiste
Pattern:   New Look 6557, Simplicity 2886, self-drafted
Year:   Modern
Notions:   32" petersham ribbon from A Fashionable Stitch (it says charcoal, but to my eye, it looks more dark lavender... maybe I'm a bit colorblind?), 12" purple zipper
Time to complete: 15 1/2 hours
First worn:   June
Wear again?   Yes, at least once a week since I finished it!
Total cost:   ~$21

The fabric came from a dress I bought at a little store downtown Ann Arbor called Orchid Lane (the warehouse, where everything is $15 or less), on one of the two or three days last summer when the heat was so oppressive I wanted to dive into a pool of ice. The fabric was so light and airy, and even though the dress itself was hideous, I bought it anyway with the intention of tearing it apart and upcycling the fabric. I wish I had a before photo for you. It was a maxi tube dress, with a widely-shirred cheap shiny black polyester bodice and this lovely fabric attached. I cut away that cheap black poly as soon as I got the dress home, and then the rest of the fabric sat in my stash until last week.

A couple of months ago, my sister gave me a bunch of her old clothes. She's purging her rather immense closet, and I'm the lucky beneficiary of said purge. Except that many (read "almost all") of those clothes weren't made to fit my body. My favorite dress in the pile I brought home was an adorable black and white dress. Minor problem: the dress was made for a girl with a B-cup, not my rather ample bosom (I don't know why, but I love finding opportunities to say "ample bosom." Maybe it has something to do with those romance novels my friends and I used to giggle over back in 10th-grade chemistry class).

Refusing to accept the inevitability of not owning said dress, I turned to my pattern stash and discovered that one of the bodice options for New Look 6557 (my blue daisy sheet dress) is almost an exact duplicate of my sister's dress's bodice. I thought it would be perfect for the summer and pulled out the pretty purple fabric I ripped off that ugly Orchid Lane dress last year.

As soon as I pulled it out, I remembered that that fabric is super flimsy and tears/pulls really easily. This was the first opportunity I've had to use Sullivan's fabric stabilizer, and I have to say, I'm totally addicted. I'm going to use it liberally every time I stitch up anything even remotely slippery. :) I also underlined all the dress pieces with white cotton batiste for extra strength.

I purchased Susan Kalje's The Couture Dress course from Craftsy last month, and I was watching it while I worked on this dress. It had more than a small influence on me. I hand-basted all of the underlining and stitched the seam allowances down by hand. "Control" became my watchword for this dress.

I loved the border print, and I wanted to use it in more places than just the hem, so I cut pieces from the top border for the midriff and the straps. The pattern calls for narrow ribbon for the straps, but I wanted more coverage, and I also didn't want it to look cheap, which I think ribbon would have done. After I cut, stitched, and pressed the straps, I found the stitches pulling on that stupid, flimsy fabric, the fabric wouldn't press properly, and I realized that I hadn't even considered underlining the straps. Silly.

My solution: dig through my stash in search of the 3/4" petersham ribbon I bought from A Fashionable Stitch. It matched perfectly, and I hand-stitched it to the backs of the straps. It makes the straps themselves a little more substantial, too. I didn't machine stitch them because I wanted the stitching to be invisible on the front (can you see it? I can, but only from about 12" away!), and I didn't want to put any more stress on the fabric than I already had. Now the straps are super strong, and will definitely last. And they're pretty on both sides as well. :) See the difference in how it lays? So much more body and less puckering!

I love this dress. It only has one problem, and it's one that I kind of knew about from the beginning. That flimsy fabric isn't going to last very long, even with meticulous hand-stitching and cotton batiste underlining and petersham ribbon stabilizing the straps. It's already starting to fray at the waist gathers, but I intend to wear this dress until I completely wear it out, I love it so much.

Rather than wait for my new sun dress to wear out, I am actually working on my next project. We're pretty much fully moved into the house, and I have another new dress on my sewing table. All it needs is neckline and armhole finishing and a hem, and it'll be set to wear (and post)! Knowing me, that'll take more than just one day, but I apologize for my long internet absence, and promise some more frequent posting in the months to come.

Vacation and Pattern Swap Patterns

I don't think I mentioned that I was going on vacation with my sister. We went to Key West, and it was so much fun. We went on a tour of the Everglades, where it poured on us the whole time, but I got to hold a baby alligator (those things are heavier than they look!).

I only wore one me-made item on the trip, and it was my blue daisy dress. We rented bikes, and I biked in this dress with no problem. My crazy more-than-full-circle skirt, not so much. :) Anyway, here's the dress in action (sorry there's not much to see, but you can see the bright yellow wristlet I carried with it). Also, does anyone else feel like mojitos are the epitomy of summer?



While in Key West, I had the bad luck to lose my clutch (not the yellow one...that was the replacement), which had my camera in it. Sadly, this means no photos for the blog until I can afford to get a new one. :( Well, except for photos like the ones above, taken on my sister's camera, and photos like those below, gleaned from the generous interwebs.

On the bright side, when I got back, I had a lovely little package in the mail. I participated in the latest Sew Weekly swap, organized by Tina Crossgrove, and the talented and generous Seeks had sent me two different patterns! I also sent my partner two patterns, but I wasn't expecting to receive two! Anyway, check out these lovelies:

First up, this elegant 60s wrap dress. It's a bust 32 (who knows how the photo I managed to find just happens to be bust 32 as well, but I'm not questioning!), and I'm loving the short-sleeved version.

(because I borrowed this photo, I'm going to link to the Etsy seller it belongs to, in case any of you would also like to own this lovely pattern)

Second was this stunning 70s gown. So... I love the 50s and 60s, and so many of the 70s fashions are just so.... tacky. But this gown? A-mazing. Maybe not so much all the ruffles (although, possibly some of them?), but I love the smooth lines, the flowing skirt, the fitted silhouette through the bodice and waist... I'm in love with this dress, and all the variations that don't really look all that different on the envelope. :) I even love the little jacket (especially the lace version, and even the ruffles at the wrists. It's bust 38, but I'm willing to try my hand at pattern grading because I love it so much.

(again, a borrowed photo warrants a link to the owner's Etsy shop. This particular pattern is no longer for sale, but the shop has a huge collection of awesome 70s patterns and a smaller collection of other vintage patterns.)

Thank you, Seeks! I'm so excited about these patterns!

Pinterest Parade #6

I was hunting around Modcloth today, which I know everyone does occasionally (or a lot), and I found some super cute dresses I'm thinking about replicating. After I get through everything else in my sewing queue...

This dress is just adorable, with the sheer overlay that's ruched at the bodice. It actually looks strikingly similar to the first dress I ever sewed, McCall's 5001. The only difference is the seam at the waistline, and the sweetheart neckline is less defined in this dress. Sadly, I cut the pattern itself out instead of tracing it when I first stitched this up, so I'm not sure what kind of shape it's in.

(pinned here)

This dress is pretty similar too. I do have a thing for strapless sweetheart dresses with flared skirts, don't I? Even my wedding gown fits into this category! Anyway, I love the polkadots and the colors. Is that skirt navy or black? I want it to be navy, so that's what I'll call it. :)

(pinned here)

Not strapless! I really love this dress. I could probably wear it every day, except that the colors wouldn't be the best on me. But in other colors, I could rock this dress. Maybe I'd make it separates instead of a dress, though. More versatile that way? Hmm... I'm thinking the Colette Sorbetto for the top, but I'm not sure what pattern I'd use for the skirt.

(pinned here)

This dress is adorable, with the pleats and the draping. I'm not an orange girl, but I'm a sewer, so it wouldn't have to be orange. The thing is, I have no idea how to go about making this dress. Maybe I could submit it to Sew Weekly's Make This Look.

(pinned here)

Again with the Sorbetto-like top and gathered skirt look. This is one dress, but it could totally be separates. I'm thinking I need to try my hand at the Sorbetto, maybe with ruffles...

(pinned here)

Last but not least, one of my favorites of the bunch. I love the way the piping was used all the way down the front center seam. I'd wear this dress at least once a week if I owned it. I'm also fairly certain that I could find a similar pattern. (It seems I'm really into polkadots this week too.)

(pinned here)