Deckchair Dress

I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas have had fun over the last few days, and that you are all finding the time and inclination for sewing.  My Christmas was good - too much cleaning and shopping for my liking, and way too little sleep or sewing, BUT it was great to catch up with relatives on both my and Mr UpSewLate's sides of the family, and quite satisfying to plan and produce a festive meal for a big group :).

Anyway, I finally have some free time so I'm going to try to blog a few of the garments I made this year that I hadn't gotten around to documenting. I'll start with this one - I'll call it the Deckchair Dress because the fabric looks better suited to a deckchair - which I showed on Instagram a while ago.

I think it looks quite good in these photos, but in real life this dress is not a success.

I bought this fabric from the Home Dec area of Lincraft, but it's extremely soft and limp.  I ironed and starched it for a very long time to get it to look relatively good for photos, but it crumples very easily, frays like mad. and stretches out as you sew seams in it. It's such a wimpy fabric that I can't really imagine it suiting any kind of home dec project - actually any project at all.  So why did I buy it?  I loved the stripes, the price was good, and the fabric in the shop had been treated with something that made it feel sturdier. Lesson learnt! Next time I hanker after striped canvas I'll look for the real thing.  

Anyway, leaving aside the fabric fail, the whole point of this dress was to have a bit of fun playing with stripes. I started with the bodice part of Vogue 8815, making sure to align the waist darts exactly with the vertical stripes. The bodice was a bit short, so I added a "belt" with the lovely blue stripes on the horizontal before adding a simple long skirt - aiming for an old fashioned look. The skirt has pleats that line up with the waist darts, and also a funny little pleat over the side seam to address the fact that when I was working out the skirt shape I forgot I have a big difference between waist and hip measurements.

This dress was incredibly easy to sew, but it took my quite a while to decide which stripes I wanted where. And even then...  well if you look closely you'll see that although I've matched the location of the central blue stripes between the bodice front and skirt front, the stripes on either side of the centre front don't match.  I cut the skirt pieces out so the stripes would match, but the skirt front and back are just rectangles, and what I've obviously done is sewn the front skirt piece on upside down :(.

And speaking of mistakes, have a look at the back view: the centre back zip is an ugly mess, there's too much length in the lower back (hello wrinkles), and there's gaping in the upper back / shoulder area. Oh well, the dress is already at the op shop and will hopefully be bought by someone who doesn't notice the issues.

Oh well, they can't all be successes, can they!

I'll be back soon with more sewing.

See you soon

- Gabrielle x

Picnic Dress Gabby

We seem to be experiencing another summer heatwave here in Sydney - and these things seem to be coming more regularly - so yesterday, when I noticed myself pulling out my Starry, Starry Gabby to wear yet again, it felt like the right time for whipping up another Gabby dress.

Ah, but what fabric to use? I'm trying to sew from my stash, so I looked around the sewing area of the study and noticed this fabric I'd bought to make my son a short sleeved shirt using a cool vintage pattern (see? not entirely selfish!).

Hmmm... Maybe not really his style? I asked him what he thought, he thought definitely not. Within about 5 seconds of that rejection, the fabric was on the ground and the Gabby pattern pieces were strewn about :).  I wish I could tell you the fabric was a cool 100% cotton or linen, but sadly it's just a cheap poly-cotton from Lincraft - I simply fell for the oversized checks.

Speaking of oversized checks, there seem to be lots of wonderful gingham garments around but THIS Celestial dress of Rosie's is the one that fired up my imagination most recently.  I absolutely love both Rosie's dress and the bucketload of inspiration pictures she's posted alongside it.

Oh and I should mention that when I posted a picture of this dress to Instagram shortly after finishing it, Carolyn commented that she was just finishing off a very similar dress - so look out for Carolyn's gingham dress on her blog VERY soon (I'm already expecting to prefer hers to mine!)

I'm sure the Gabby is not the perfect summer dress for everyone, but it really works for me, and now I've made it a few times (the Starry one, this one in a stretch, and another recent, unblogged dress in a heavy Nani Iron cotton) it comes together ridiculously fast - so this dress was all done in a day, in between chatting with the kids and feeding them. As I've made and blogged it before and it's such a straightforward dress, I won't review the pattern itself and instead I'll just list the changes I made this time around:

• Lengthened the sleeves about 2cm.
• Added 16cm length all around, then removed 16cm length after the dress was all done bar the hems, then noticed it was a bit short (I'm about 5'8"), so left an overlocked edge instead of a hem.
• Added in-seam pockets, the size based on putting my hand down on the fabric, and position based on trying on the partially sewn dresss and pinning the top and bottom of a space where my hand naturally wanted to slide into a pocket. I didn't have enough fabric to be able to pattern match pockets to the dress, but the pocket pieces match each other and are symmetric too. 
• Added bust darts to assist in matching up the checks on the side seams and because that little bit of excess length in the front edges looked like the right amount for a bust dart.

Spot the bust darts! Oh and btw, the front has moved off centre in this picture. 

Pattern matching and in-seam pockets

That's all, but I'll be back soon with the Nani Iro version and a dress in the fabric of the year (ah, but which year?).



See you soon

- Gabrielle x

Coral Linen Eva Dress

One final post before the year ends - Happy New Year everyone!

Before we went on our big European holiday a couple of months ago, I got it into my head that I needed a new summery dress to wear in the hopefully sunny places we'd be visiting.

So as you already know from the blog title, the pattern I used was the Eva dress (here's a link to the Tessuti pattern), and yes, you probably already read this in the title too: like just about everyone else, I made it in linen.  I do already have a dress in the same lovely coral shade of linen (blogged back here), but that dress has become a bit shorter in the wash, so here I've made something that can shrink lengthwise to its heart's content.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't sure this long sack style of dress would suit me...  I do generally like sack dresses, and I know this dress looks terrific on other people, but I was worried it was going to be very dowdy on me, and even when I tried the dress on after finishing it I wasn't sure I liked the length.

Anyway, I took the dress with me to Europe - and how wrong I was!

I wore this dress all through my Europe trip, and - let me keep being completely honest with you - it looked better than all the other clothes I'd brought along (oh and I might do an extra post about that - I love looking at other people's travel wardrobes!). Most of the time in Europe I felt a bit scruffy, but in this dress I felt less of a tourist :).

In an out-of-town bakery in the South of France, in this dress and heels the baker seemed to take me for a French maman bringing her kids home, and threw in extra pastries pour les enfants - et bon weekend, madame!

On a dry, hot day exploring Les Baux the dress was amazingly comfortable, and the length was easily tucked up into my undies for climbing ancient worn down steps.

And in Rome it was the one outfit that felt elegant enough for "la passeggiatta" (I believe that's strolling and sampling gelatos) among the locals :).

My little 7 year old daughter took all these photos, and I am quite astonished at her skills with my camera! I haven't had to do ANY cropping or straightening the way I do with my own photos... 

The official photographer

Pattern:

Sleeveless variant of the Eva dress from Tessuti patterns, made in a size S.  The pattern cost me $28 in hard copy form.

Fabric:
3 metres of linen from Lincraft, and I think it was about $14 / metre which would total $42.  I had about a half a metre left at the end of some sneaky cutting - Rachel had let me know she'd only needed about 2.5 metres but obviously how much you'd need depends on the size sewn, fabric width, and repeats in the fabric design.

I already had thread from my making last coral linen dress, and I didn't need any other notions, so the fabric plus pattern costs add up to $70. That sounds a lot, but with the amount of wear I've given this dress it feels worth it.

Tessuti patterns' Eva dress in coral linen

Modifications:

• Lengthened the bodice by 2cm to try to give the illusion of a longer body
• Changed the order of assembly of front and back panels to give myself a better shot at lining up the seams (they're still not perfect though - I was in too much of a hurry)
• Used a regular hem rather than binding the hem, just because I'd skipped the last part of the instructions and assumed the dress was going  to have a regular hem
• Omitted top stitching

Pros:
I love the neck and sleeve binding, I love that the instructions include steps for finishing your seams, and I love the pocket instructions - they're the real deal, and give you a properly finished pocket that sits facing to the front of the dress as it should. I remember proper pocket instructions like these in my old 80s / 90s designer Vogue patterns, but I haven't seen them in ages. And the pockets themselves are excellent, nice and roomy and positioned at a very comfortable place.

I've heard a few negative mutterings around the place about hand drawn patterns vs those drafted in CAD or whatever other software gets used, and I have to say, I absolutely don't mind if a pattern is hand drawn - what I care about is whether it's a well-drafted pattern.  Not all hand drafted patterns are good, but it seems to me that Tessuti patterns know what they're doing, even if their patterns do look 'old school"...

Cons:
I can't think of any cons!  When I initially tried this dress on and reviewed it in the bathroom mirror, I thought it would look better at just below knee length. I was wrong; the lantern shape of the skirt would be lost on a shorter dress. The bathroom mirror didn't give me enough perspective to be able to judge length, so the con is on me.

See you soon!


- Gabrielle x