Print Charming

In the weeks leading up to Melbourne Frocktails I had grand delusions of sewing myself a whole new casual wardrobe to wear while in Melbourne - some denim culottes, a cool top, a skirt in a great print and a vintage swing jacket. Of course there wasn't time for all that sewing, but I did manage one thing on that list: a cool top which I wore all day on Saturday before the party.

I think the colours are pretty true in the above photo - I don't normally like butterflies but the flowers and lovely orange, teal and pink are right up my alley!

I bought this fabric from Tessuti's Chatswood store a couple of months ago, within about a day of seeing someone in Melbourne post their purchase of the fabric on Instagram. Instagram is just terrible for making you realise there's a fabric you need, but it can also get you on the case quickly before a fabric sells out :).  This fabric is a digital print ponti, and it came in two colourways - both sold out very quickly so unfortunately I doubt you'd still be able to get it anywhere.

I only bought about a metre as from memory it was quite expensive - I think it's an Italian fabric, and it is a beautiful quality, but I don't like spending too much on stretch fabrics for some reason! Anyway, I soon had buyer's remorse and wished I'd bought more - I would really have liked to be able to make something like Kirsty's dress.





Oh well, with my little metre it had to be a top or a skirt... I thought I'd get more wear from the fabric as a top, given I spend my weekends in jeans and weekdays in a fairly conservative office, plus the colours seemed pretty good on me when I held the fabric up against myself, so a top is what it became!

I can see in these close up shots that the top had wiggled to one side - oops :). When it's not moving off to the side the shoulders actually fit very nicely!

And what pattern is it, you ask? Well this is very boring, but for a basic top, these days I seem to be using the same pattern over and over... and that staple pattern is Vogue 8916. I've made the top pattern before both as a t-shirt (my Splat! top) and with lengthened sleeves as a sort of sweatshirt (this pink / striped top).  It's very simple, but I really like the fit - it's about a million times better than the Papercut's raglan-sleeve Undercover hood on me!


As usual I sewed a size 14 in this pattern as it runs a bit smaller than the Vogue designer patterns. I cut the body to hip length according to a bit of tape measurement work (shorter than the pattern) and lengthened the sleeves based on my arm length. The neck band is a simple addition; a rectangle of fabric folded in half lengthwise, and pinned to fit to the neckline with the excess length trimmed away at a small centre back seam.

I think I have the fabric at 90 degrees to the right way up, but the fabric stretches in both directions so this direction feels fine on. And this orientation allowed me to place the flowers and butterflies where I wanted - an orange flower with a starring role in the front, pink flowers on the shoulders, and butterflies positioned to be less noticeable on the front. I know there are butterflies up high on the back, but as I can't see them they won't creep me out :).

In terms of sewing techniques, this was dead simple - I used a straight stitch on all the seams (yes, heresy, I know, but I think a straight stitch works perfectly well on a stretch seam so long as that seam isn't under stress!) and then used the overlocker to tidy everything up. The hems are top stitched with a single line of coordinating teal straight stitching at a stitch length of 3. Easy peasy!

I've come back from Frocktails incredibly inspired to sew and blog - in terms of sewing, the denim culottes are still on my radar but they're now competing with some really fun fabrics from Darn Cheap Fabrics and a couple of Named pdf patterns I bought in their recent sale. Where to start!!! And blogging - well I still need to get photos of my frockails dress and cape (sorry, I had too much on this weekend!) but I've also got a bit of a backlog of basics to blog (maybe consolidated in a single post so I don't bore you to tears) and a new top made over a couple of evenings last week with some of that Darn Cheap Fabric...


See you soon!

- Gabrielle xx

Poppies & Tulips Dress

Lately I am bored with black and craving colour - can you tell?

I finished this dress late on the night of the 30th May - in time to wear as the sewing version of "thank you" flowers to Zoe and all the MMMers on the last day of May - with an artificial sunflower as a little extra je ne sais quoi:

Thank you for all the photos, Marylene):  I still can't quite believe we found such a colour and camera coordinated backdrop (I know that's completely off topic, and I'm getting straight back to it now). 

The amazing and rather loud fabric is "Poppy Filled Dreams", a stretch digital printed jersey from Tessuti fabrics; I'd bought just 1.5 metres of the delicious stuff. Since the poppies and tulips grow along both selvedges of the fabric - you can see this if you click on the above link and look through the pics of the fabric - I wanted to use a pattern that could work with a border print.  I obviously also wanted something that wouldn't compete with the attention seeking fabric.


Enter Vogue 8511... an oldie and now very much OOP...

I'd previously sewn this as an unlined blue merino wool dress that I wear heaps in winter, especially with the cashmere jacket pictured below (photos from MMM12, taken down at Barangaroo).

It turns out 1.5 metres is not quite enough, and that's why my sleeves have wide bands on them. I spent a long time on pattern placement for the sleeves to get a tulip just above each elbow, but those specially placed tulips aren't particuarly noticeable against a flower jungle backdrop. 

Don't worry, I'm not taking up the pigeon toed stance; I'm just mid-clumsy twirl

Adjustments:

The pattern is an easy one, but I've come to think the "easy" Vogues are a lot less well drafted than the Vogue designer patterns (d'oh - that should have been a no brainer, shouldn't it!). I do find the Vogue sizing pretty consistent (and is it just me, or is Vogue sizing reasonably similar to Australian RTW sizing?) so I'm now making a couple of simple adjustments for my shape on all Vogue patterns: shoulders "in" a size, and waist "out" a size.

I knew from experience that the sleeves were unnecessaerily wide and floppy so I folded out two 1+cm sections from the full length of the sleeve pattern piece (ie taking a little width out of sleeve front and also a little width out of sleeve back), smoothed out the resulting sleeve head shape, and also went down a size in the shoulders. Narrowing the sleeves this way rather than taking all that width out of the middle of the sleeve, where the sleeve head is tallest, meant that (1) I didn't need to gather the sleeve to fit it into the arm scye, as you do with the pattern as is and (2) I didn't need to alter the shape of the sleeve head as it still had the original height. The sleeves still feel loose.

Because the dress is stretchy I left off the centre back zip (as before), which means cutting the centre back piece on the fold. I added a wide band to the sleeves (to make up for length I'd had to lose due to buying too little fabric )and a narrow band around the neckline too.  If I make this again I'll add a smidge of length to the bodice and more length to the skirt, play with the fit around the shoulders and upper bust, and narrow the sleeves and arm scye. Obviously only if I remember to buy enough fabric though.

And the skirt was shaped; not right for a border print. Easy fix. I laid the skirt front pattern piece on the fold and pivoted it so as to have the bottom hem along the selvedge. The shaping at the waist had to also pivot down from a curved shape to a straight line, keeping the pleats aligned with their original spots. In retrospect I should have taken a photo - I am not explaining this very well! Anyway, whatever it was I did for the front skirt I also did for the back :).

Here's a view of the insides of the bodice; I thought you might like to see that my lining is just as loud as my outer fabric. My lining is rather stretchy and a bit heavier than the outer so I treated it like an underlining and held it taut as I sewed it to the outer fabric pieces.

And that's it!

See you anon,
              Gabrielle