Sewciedone Dress

This is the last piece of this gorgeous spotted cotton sateen that I bought back in April of 2011. I feel I have done it justice.

The rest of the 11m stack that I bought with this fabric became a Crescent Skirt, Portrait Dress and a brightly coloured quilt. Adding in this dress, each of the four are very different. It's interesting to see what varied potential just one type of fabric can have.

  

This dress is a mash up of the bodice from the sewcietea dress (without the contrast band), and the skirt from the Dear and Doe Belladone. This version of the belladone skirt incorporates the alteration I mentioned intending to do at the end of my post about my Roisin Dress, which I am calling a "Full Bum Adjustment", and I intend to talk about properly another time.

To add some interest to the dress, I decided to add piping. I also think that the miss-match of the spots with the waistband would have looked strange without anything defining the seam. I initially thought of flat piping, but decided to woman up and go for the real thing. This is the first time I've done "proper" piping, and as straight forward as the process was, I wouldn't want to do it on anything where I'm not sure of the fit.

As I wasn't sure about how to handle the piping and an invisible zip, I elected to hand-pick a dress zip into the centre back seam of the dress.

The dress is lined throughout with (I think) some white voile (I get the light weight cotton fabrics a bit confused), and has some interfacing (probably slightly heavier than ideal) in the waistband.

I couldn't be more happy with the construction, fit and overall look of this dress.

Pattern: Self-drafted 'sewcietea' bodice, Belladone by Dear and Doe skirt

Fabric: Cotton Sateen from Spotlight

Notions: Thread, interfacing (for waistband), matching dress zip, white voile for lining and piping fabric, smallest piping cord I could find.

Quietly busy...

While things have been a bit quiet around here lately, it's because things have been busy elsewhere in my life. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on things. In particular I have been slowly working on a long forgotten work in progress, a quilt that has been sat on the back of my couch for about 2 years waiting for the last third or so if hand quilting to be finished.

I'm getting close to finishing now, and will hopefully soon be able to go and pick out some binding...

Portrait Dress

You know when you read somebody using the phrase 'whipped up' a garment? Is it just me that frequently thinks "whipped up? come on, clothes aren't generally whipped up! There's more work involved than that!"? Well, as much as I fear using the phrase myself, I really did 'whip up' this dress this week. I mean, two pieces and some bias binding, there's really not that much to it.

When making up my second portrait blouse a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but think about how the blouse would work lengthened into a dress. So this week, when I had some spare time, I had a go at extending the portrait blouse pattern into a dress.

Most of my summer dresses are of the fitted bodice, full skirt variety, which don't get me wrong, I love. However, when it's really hot and you just want something to lounge around in, you don't really want to be wearing a fitted bodice! So, the intent is that this will fill that gap in my summer wardrobe. (I know, I know, summer is over, whatever! It was still hot when I started this... but colder when I finished. It's Melbourne, you never know, the heat could come back!)

To convert the pattern into a dress, I taped some extra fabric to the bottom and extended the side seams out at an angle similar to the edge below the waist already. Also, knowing that I have quite a, shall we say, developed derrière, I pivoted the centre back seam so that it was the same size at the neckline, but about 2" extra at the centre back at the hipline (well 4" as it is on the fold). I measured the blouse and my measurements to make sure that there was plenty of ease through the hips and cut it out!

When sewn up the only real change I made was altering the back tucks - I made them bigger than they were originally  (about 3 times the size) to bring the fabric in across my lower back. This was necessary because of the extra fabric I had added by pivoting the centre back seam out. Now it's finished though, I think the back tucks are stitched a little long, and I'm planning on unpicking the bottom inch of them to let them finish slightly higher up. I hemmed it a couple of inches above the knee, to make it long enough not to flash people when bending over and such, but short enough not to be frumpy.

The fabric that I used is a lightweight sateen from spotlight, one of a whole host of matching spots I bought about 2 years ago. (This actual fabric is actually also in my 'seeing spots' quilt, which is about half quilted and patiently waiting to be finished, but I bought extra, always with the intent to make a dress with it).

While my other two portrait blouses were finished with self bias binding on the inside, I knew as soon as I tried on this dress mid-construction that I needed to find some green fabric that matched the green spots in the print.

I found this green at GJs, it's actually a quilting cotton, which I'm normally very cautious of using in garments, but as it was the PERFECT colour I decided to risk it. I am very surprised at how well it worked out actually! I loosely followed this tutorial, and am really happy with how it's sitting. Also, I used a topstitching foot when doing the topstitching on the binding, and am absolutely thrilled at how well it turned out!

Overall I'm incredibly happy with this dress. If I were to make another one I think I might curve the skirt side seams a bit to make it a tiny bit strighter and less a-line, but other than that so far I'm loving it!

A bit of a Sewaholic Day

Saturday morning I finished my second version of the Crescent Skirt. My first one gets worn a LOT, it's become one of the 'go to' items in my wardrobe, so I thought it was about time that I got around to making the second version I planned way back when I got the pattern. The fabric I've used is some more of the spotty sateen that I used for my "seeing spots" quilt.

Firstly I need to show you this photo so that some of the below ones make sense - I don't usually pair a green skirt with blue and pink wellies, but you see it was pouring down with rain here on Saturday when I first wore the skirt so I was also wearing my Minoru:

(do you see the awesome street art lion in the background?)

And onto the skirt...

As I know from working with it before that this sateen is very fine and frays quite easily I decided to follow the suggestion in the sewalong and sew french seams wherever I could, which makes it look lovely inside:

I also used Tasia's fantastic zip method, which looks so smart, and no hand sewing!

 

Because the seam lines in the waistband cut up the spots somewhat I decided to emphasise those lines by topstitching either side of the seams with brown thread, using the triple stretch stitch on my machine:

And some pics of the skirt on me:

  

And a couple where the waistband isn't covered:

 

Seeing spots

Mindy has assisted me in naming this quilt - "seeing spots". Which is now basted and ready to quilt. I have decided to go with the basic quilting of outlining the L shapes with the matching thread, which I think will look awesome on the back. Time will tell.

Quilting Opinions Please

Yesterday I went to GJs in my lunch break. GJs is about 5km from where I work, and I rode like the wind to get there and back in my lunch break, and I managed it, hurrah! While I was there I got the backing, quilting thread and batting for my spotty quilt (which still needs a name, so suggestions gratefully taken).

I had intended to get the grey version of the spotty backing fabric that I used on my genome quilt, however they were all out of it so I had to change my plans. I stuck with the grey scheme though and got two grey homespuns. I am planning on hand quilting it with perle 8 threads, and Georgia was kind enough to order me in some colours to match my fabrics, 5 of the 6 colours have come in so far, I'm just waiting on some teal as my last colour. I also got some bamboo batting for the middle. I've not used bamboo before, but I want to try some new things to see what I like the most, so I shall report back on how it turns out.

Last night, however, I fell over in the garden and sprained my ankle, which is now pretty sore and very swollen. Nevertheless, one to look for silver linings, I realised that I my "sewing machine foot" was still perfectly fine (I sprained the left), so after resting most of the day I spent a couple of hours this afternoon sewing the quilt top together, so the day wasn't a complete bust.

Now, the reason for posting this now - I'd like suggestions/opinions for quilting this please. I want to hand quilt it, and I (will) have perle 8 thread to match the 6 main colours of the fabrics. How would you quilt it??

Retreat 2.0

This past weekend I headed up to hepburn springs again for another retreat. We had such fun on the last retreat back in May that we booked in for another, even longer, one while we were still there. This time we stayed 3 nights, and it was lots of fun and incredibly productive.

I got lots of sewing done, including assembling the blocks for two quilt tops. Above are the base blocks for the quilt I am making with the spotty sateen fabric I bought earlier in the year. The blocks have since been cut into quarters bento box style, and the quarters trimmed to 8" square ready to be assembled into a quilt top.


Below are the rest of the hexagons that I started on the other weekend, and I love how they look, piecing them together has definitely transformed the fabric. I just need to get some solid cream fabric and I will begin assembling the quilt top of this one too.

This means that soon I'll have some quilting projects on the go again, which i'm excited about. I'm planning on hand quilting the spotty one, although don't exactly know what design yet, so suggestions gratefully received.  In contrast I'm considering machine free motion quilting the hexagon one, probably just with a stippling pattern, however as i'm hoping the quilt will be about queen sized I may regret that decision and change my mind with either the quilting method or design.


I did get some other stuff done over the weekend, about which I shall blog in due course.