Striped Linen Lacey

Does anyone write blog posts anymore? 

Does anyone read them?

I made this dress over a year ago - it's a StyleArc Lacey dress sewn up in a gorgeous striped linen from Tessuti fabrics - and it's one that gets a LOT of wear in summer.  The fabric was meant to be for a collared shirt for my son, but he doesn't ever choose to wear collared shirts, besides which he's been growing so fast that it felt crazy not to wait for all the growing to stop.

Hmmmm... come to think of it, he's now taller than me, so there may be a couple of years before the next growth spurt... (is that the way teenage boys grow? catch up to mum first, then a few years later catch up to dad?)

Whatever, we can call it selfish sewing ;).  I have a very forgiving son. He takes pretty decent photos too.

The Lacey dress is listed as being suitable for knit, jersey, rayon or silk fabric - in other words you want stretchy or drapey. If you choose linen you may end up with something a bit Scandi retro reminiscent, and a quick internet search ("sasha doll striped blue dress") will take you to the dress I think I must have accidentally copied.  I haven't become blond or doll-like, but the dress makes me feel good, so some subconscious desires have obviously now been fulfilled!

As usual, I should tell you about the pattern, right? 

It's a very easy sew and a forgiving fit (ie just check the waist measurement and if that's big enough to get your shoulders through you'll be fine). The shoulders are dropped and the sleeves are then basically cut on, and the skirt is simply gathered. Because there's a "feature" panel on the front and back bodices, this is a pattern you could go totally Beccy Home Eccy on - or mock pinafore - but hopefully not.  I only made very basic simple modifications in my version: extra length as usual in the skirt, and skipped the sleeve cuffs. 

These photos were taken at a beach not too far from Byron in January this year. Just to the right of the breakwater is an area where you can watch dolphins surf. We didn't see too many - one couple catching waves to the shore, swimming back out, then catching the waves in again and again - but even watching two dolphins was pretty cool.

 I can't wait to get back to the beach - but preferably a quiet one like this one!

I'll be back!


See you anon
- Gabrielle xx
Easy slip-on dress with an extended shoulder, square line bodice and slightly gathered skirt.

To Work: Vintage Calvin Klein

Ta daaaa!  Yep, it's another top...


This one is sewn from a vintage pattern from my 80s/90s pattern collection (which is NOT a "carefully curated collection", though seriously, what even does that phrase mean? Does it just mean "a group of things I like"??). The pattern looks pretty boring in the envelope photos, but it's a designer pattern, which I find usually guarantees good bones, and the back of the envelope shows three very different tops, one of which (this one) only needs a metre of fabric.

The pattern is described as follows:

Loose-fitting pullover top or wrap blouse has cap or full-length sleeves. A and B mock bands, A: buttoned shoulder and sleeves closing. B: dropped shoulders and side-buttoned closing. C: extended shoulders, front pleated into self-lined yoke with forward shoulder seams and two-piece sleeves with buttoned cuffs shown pushed up.

I have a few of Calvin Klein's top patterns from the 70s, 80s and 90s and they seem to have quite a consistent, minimalist aesthetic, but this pattern is from 1986 - even though it has no shoulder pads. Vogue magazine anticipated the 1990s Calvin Klein designs would inspire Raf Simons' 2017 Calvin Klein collection (article and links to collections here), so maybe this is nearly fashionable?? Probably not, haha!

Anyway, these next photos of the pattern come from an etsy shop (linked) that had the pattern for sale as at the time of writing, but I can see it's available in lots of other online shops too if you like the look of it.

So obviously I made view A, the one that takes only a metre of fabric, and I left off the lovely buttoned shoulder detail - with my drapey silk twill I was worried I'd mess up, and the top gets on and off without any closures anyway.

This little top is intended to slot into my work wardrobe - black pants and skirts mixed with more interesting tops and jumpers - and though it looks summery with its fluttery cap sleeves, I think it's going to suit winter too in my current, very warm office.

These pants by the way are RTW, but if you could see them in person you might notice they're quite similar to Vogue 8909, with a loose fit (looser than the Hudson pants) and elasticized waist and ankles.  I'd make a pair except I already have a pair!

Vogue 8909 pants

Not Vogue 8909 pants, but a similar style

Because I left off the shoulder and sleeve buttoning closure this was a very straightforward top to sew.  The fabric, a gorgeous Italian silk twill from Tessuti Fabrics (sorry but it was purchased ages ago so I doubt it'd still be in stock) was a bit shifty to sew so that made things a little slower, but it was still only the matter of a few hours.

I used French seams on the shoulders and side seams and a rolled hem on the sleeves, and I should have but didn't use Lena's gelatine trick for shifty fabrics (here's Lena's original tip blogged in 2011, and here's the link to the 2012 Threads article inspired by Lena's blog post).  The rolled hem is wonky over the French seams, so perhaps French seams weren't such a good idea - that seam area was such a lot bulkier than the rest of the hem.

And I'm not sure if you can see this in the first of the detailed photos below, but I also used Debbie's trick for neat interfaced facings with no messy edges.

One of the nice things about a pattern like this is that it's really easily adjusted up or down a size.  My copy of this pattern was a size 10, but by widening the neckline and adding to the width of the top (including sleeve length) my top was effectively made as a size 12.

Not smug but happy - and that's all!


Happy sewing

- Gabrielle xx

Inari 2: Adjusting the Sleeves

Way back when (well here...) I blogged an Inari dress I was feeling equivocal about. It was made from a medium weight cotton, and despite the pattern's fabric suggestions ("light to medium weight fabric, inelastic or with stretch") the fabric just felt wrong for the dress and exacerbated sleeve fit issues that would probably have been less noticeable in a knit fabric.

Ever since, I've been meaning to re-make the Inari with a modified sleeve, but also to re-make the Inari in a knit fabric without modifying the sleeve, to see how the sleeve felt when the stretch of the fabric took on the role of accommodating arm motion. What I've finally got around to is a hybrid re-make; the Inari dress with a modified sleeve, in a knit fabric.

Spoiler alert: this one's a keeper:

I put this modification off for a long time, but it's actually super easy.  I took a couple of photos to illustrate how I applied a different sleeve (the sleeve and arm scye from Simplicity 1366), but I'll also describe the process in words of course.

So first of all I cut out the sleeves from Simplicity 1366, with the only change being a reduction in sleeve length. I measured the length of the Inari sleeve (based on that short straight seam under the armpit) and folded up the S1366 sleeve to a matching length.

Below you can see the difference in the two sleeve shapes. The Inari has a much higher sleeve cap, and I figured that since I was flattening this out in the S1366 sleeve (and also since the S1366 sleeve sits on a slightly dropped shoulder) I could forget about the curved hemline - the total sleeve length from the shoulder point should be very similar. Here are the shortened S1366 and Inari sleeves laid on top of each other (I have the Inari front sleeve sitting on top of the S1366 back sleeve):

If you change a sleeve so radically, you of course need to change the arm scye it'll be sewn into. To do this I aligned my Inari and S1366 front and back pattern pieces along the shoulder line, with the grain line arrows parallel to each other.  Since S1366 makes a pretty loose top (a couple of centimetres wider than the Inari in the sizes I've made) I didn't align the pattern pieces on Centre Front or Back, but instead had the pattern pieces matching on width at the underarm - and this means I didn't have to change the side seams of the dress at all.  You can see below that the biggest impact of this change is that the arm scye is raised significantly - ie the sleeve now sits closer into the underarm:

This process is super easy to do, but it does rely on your having a pattern that fits the way you like. The two areas I'm fussy about when I do this are (1) the shoulder line - I want to keep the shape of the shoulder line from the pattern that fits me, and if it's very different from the shoulder line of the pattern I'm adapting I'll spend a bit of time working out the point at which the two shoulder lines should meet (near the neckline vs near the arm), and (2) the grainline - the grainline of the pattern that fits reaaly has to be parallel to the grainline of the pattern being modified. But I'm sure most of you already know this and more!

I kept the Inari sleeve cuffs (but because I sewed the dress with my own order of construction I can't turn the cuffs back the way the pattern intends):

And I used the neckband intended for knit versions of the dress:

Happily even with my sleeve changes the dress still looks like an Inari - and I can finally join the Inari fan club! Happy happy days...

And what's more, I managed to eke this dress out of 1.1 1.5 metres of 150 cm wide fabric (!!) and now have only the tiniest scraps leftover - that makes me even happier! 

Now with my previous Inari I talked a bit about mitred self-faced hems, but if you look at the examples in my "how to" for this sort of finish, you'll see that it's more commonly used with woven fabrics (stretch wovens included).  My very stretchy viscose (an Italian viscose/ lycra from Tessuti fabrics which looks to be sold out in their online shop - but this link takes you to their other printed jerseys) didn't feel like it would support the weight of a mitred self-faced hem without the dress stretching out, so I used the narrow hem finish suggested in the pattern this time around. And because my fabric was a bit shifty, I used steam-a-seam to keep the vertical and horizontal hem edges nice and straight:

The corners DO sometimes flick out in motion:

but mostly they're well behaved:

Thank you to my lovely daughter for taking these terrific photos for me (and some gorgeous floral close-ups)!

And I'll see you soon!

- Gabrielle xx

Summer Blues: Floral Bomber & Big Denim Skirt

Two for the price of one today!

What I'd like to share with you today are a modified Butterick bomber jacket (B6181) and a Vogue Nicola Finetti skirt (V1486), with thanks to my daughter for the happy photos :).

Let's start with the jacket - top down, as it were!

I started this floral bomber jacket several months ago - in fact I think it was in October, back home from our Italy trip - after being inspired by some online images of oversized, 90s style canvas bomber jackets. This jacket is very far removed from my original inspiration, but that's the way it usually seems to go for me - I start at point a, get sidetracked to point b, and end up at point c. I'm sure that's pretty normal :). I can't find my original inspiration images any more, but basically I'd stumbled across some waist-length canvas bomber jackets with a boxy, minimalist style. I've got my own sketches of what I found (point a), and to be honest they're closer to the Falda jacket than to what I've made here... I'll have to make the Falda later!

So starting with my "point c" sketches I went trawling through the technical drawings of all the possible contenders from my pattern stash. Although the cover art on B6181 is very boring and dated-looking to me, the pattern had the raglan sleeves, zip front and simple shape I was looking for - and it was already in my stash :). Here's what the technical drawings and illustration look like - and I went with View D:

I thought it would be pretty straightforward to make this more cropped and more fitted (oh so different to my original inspiration!), and it was. All I did was to go down 1 size from the one that fit my measurements (getting rid of the looseness), and remove length from the sleeves, body, facings and pockets - about 10cm, removed starting from the bottom of the pocket working upwards, and removed from the lower arm section of the sleeves.

Because this interpretation was so different from my original idea, I didn't use canvas - instead I used a lovely textured Japanese cotton from Tessuti fabrics (the indigo / cream) floral coupled with a little bit of denim from a large piece bought at The Fabric Store (and the same fabric as used for the skirt). The denim collar and waistband (and facings) came about because I had slightly too little fabric, and I thought the denim coordinated reasonably well with the floral and would also go with most other garments I might wear this jacket with. The zip is one that was in my stash - how handy is a stash! - but was originally bought at Spotlight when I thought I might make a few bags (didn't happen).

I'm pretty happy with the way this jacket had turned out - for example, the collar worked out very nicely after a few passes:

but there is one detail I need to correct - I made the elastic in the waistband too loose:

In the next photo you can also see that the pockets innards show when I use the pockets and the jacket is unzipped... I think the jacket would be improved by top stitching the pockets to the jacket outer.  I guess I can still go back and do this if it bothers me, but the pockets are set slightly too high to be practical on me, so this may not be an issue. 

And now for the skirt.

The inspiration for this skirt was my fellow blogger Rachel, who posted a terrific photo of herself wearing this pattern on Instagram (here) - and I wanted a skirt just like hers!

My version of the skirt also uses denim from The Fabric Store (copy cat! I hope you don't mind Rachel, but at least we're in different States, right?).  I've done a terrible job in ironing my fabric after pre-washing it, but my current iron just doesn't get very hot - I recently used its cotton setting on polyester and the heat was just right, which seems wrong. Please excuse the wrinkles...

I sewed this up in a size 14 with a size 16 waist. I would normally add about 10cm to a skirt or dress, but this time I cut the length as designed because it *looked* long...  Anyway, the skirt has turned out a bit shorter than expected (I'm about 5'8" and have a short upper body) so I've left the hem raw and am hoping it will eventually acquire a cool slightly frayed look.

Here's a look at the technical drawing for the pattern:

The waistband is just a rectangle (my waistband facing is navy blue cotton voile, as are my pocket lining pieces) and unfortunately that's not the right shape for me; I need at least a little curve in there. I forgot to ask my daughter to take photos without the jacket so you'll have to trust me on this, but the waistband needs a couple of darts to fit better. I think it looks OK with the jacket open, but there's definitely some gaping at the sides.

The skirt has in-seam pockets and the most awesome pleats in the lower tier - at the front and back, but also along the side seams:

I haven't sewn anything but invisible zips for ages, and I didn't think I could sew regular zips in neatly, but I followed the steps in the pattern and I'm happy with the way the CB zip has worked. The Vogue skirt instructions included more steps than I previously would have used for a regular zip, so I expect that's why it's better than usual for me - it's centred and even, and although there are bumps where the skirt meets the waistband, I can tolerate that because I know there were a few layers of denim in the seam allowance there...

(Oh and I should say I'm pretty happy with the zip on my jacket too - it might be time to branch out from invisible zips!)

Here's the side / back view:

All up I'm happy with this outfit - not perfect, but pretty good.  And even though I don't think the skirt style does my thick waist any favours I'm considering this skirt pattern as a contender for the upcoming Sydney Frocktails - that's crazy though, isn't it?

See you soon

Gabrielle xx