Saturday, July 28, 2012

dresses, a skirt, and blatantly ripped off ideas

I finally cracked open one of my fourties era patterns, and made some dresses out of what was supposed to be a night dress. I'm so scandalous, haha.

black cotton lawn (and newly strawberry hair)

ties in the back, don't mind the wrinkles

It was originally floor length, but I hacked a bunch of the skirt off to make a better sun dress. other than that this is exactly how it came out of the envelope. Loose fitted garments are so much easier to make!

dopey look and a big gate

it was rather windy, haha

While I had been planning the black version of this dress for months, the pink one was completely spur of the moment. I saw the fabric in my local craft store and had to make it up right away. Originally I thought of it as a trial run for that pattern before cutting into my real, well thought out black version, which of course resulted in me wearing this one about three times as often. Why are the unintentional projects always the ones that end up most loved? At least in my closet :).

standing in the bush/shade to photograph pale fabric

hello bush, such a nice day to run around in the yard, isn't it?

In fact, I liked the pink rose dress so much that I had to go back and get the same fabric in the green colourway. And a larger rose print in blue! The blue needs to be some sort of, as yet undecided on, outrageous shirt, but even before I got out of the store, I knew the green was going to be this tiered skirt. Yay for comfy elastic waists, and garments made entirely of rectangles! It was so simple that the Japanese pattern book I got the pattern from didn't even have pattern pieces for it, just the dimensions of the rectangles and how many of each. It has a little self fabric bow at the waist to indicate which is the front, but I didn't get a picture of it.

On my sewing table (dining room table, really) right now is a black batiste Violet, and an asymmetrical lolita skirt that will probably be shelved for a while, as the fabric is too warm to wear right now anyway. Also, I just discovered the delightful Cindy at Cation Designs, and her wonderful idea to use sheets (especially kids superhero sheets) to make dresses. Needless to say, I now have a selection of retro geek sheets in the mail, and can't wait to make them into the cutest dresses! The only catch being that I refuse to wear nerdy paraphernalia unless I can have an intelligent conversation about it, so now my love of sewing has combined rather unexpectedly with my love of comics, as I must at least start reading about each superhero before the dresses get made. What a tragedy ;).