This is what I ended up making.

The wool tartan came from my husband’s grandmother’s collection. I’m not sure where she got it from, but it looks like she had already made something with it as the end was cut pretty roughly.

The pattern was self drafted. It took me forever to work out the best way to draft it & I actually tried a couple of different ways before finally working it out. Once I’d worked out the best way to do it though, it was super easy to make & only required 2 seams, a hem, a zip & some tacks. I’ll try to post some instructions tomorrow.

I’m really happy with how this skirt turned out, it was just what I wanted. The skirt doesn’t have a lining at the moment. Which is a little annoying because it’s a little scratchy. So I might make a basic lining & sew it in place later on. Probably after winter, because it’s not too scratchy with tights on.

P.S. I got old recently & had to get glasses…

I followed patterns pretty religiously for the first 3 years I sewed. Any deviation from a pattern, required supervision from my mum, because I would probably stuff it up.

Yes seriously – ask my Mum.

Even then, following a pattern closely was no guarantee of success. For example, the first time I tried to make pants (summer of 2005-2006). I’d decided to make a pair of loose fitting linen pants. I thought I was following the pattern exactly, but somehow I ended up with an oddly shaped skirt instead of pants.

Anyway, the point of this post (and a few more in the next few weeks/months), was to share some of the things that I made in the first 3 years I was sewing, that I still love to wear now, to show my friends that it is possible to sew nice things, that you’ll keep for ages without much experience.

This dress was the first thing I made that I looked at & thought, I can’t believe I made that. It looks store bought. It was such a nice feeling.

I made this dress in November 2006. So I’d been sewing for 1-1.5 years. I’d just finished my university exams for the semester & had about 4 weeks at home before Greg & I went to Europe together on our first big trip.

This dress had a specific purpose. I wanted a simple black dress that could be shoved in my suitcase & travel around with me.

I used Vogue V2899 to make this. I remember this dress being a real challenge for me. There were times during the construction process when I was reading the same step over & over again trying to understand what the hell I was meant to do. It ended up taking me a good couple of days to make the dress. I got there in the end though.

I still wear this dress, it’s comfy & it looks good. I think I’ll continue wearing this dress for a few more years to come, which is I guess all you can ask for from a little black dress.

The red & navy silk brocade was a new purchase, but everything else was made with scraps & remnants already in my stash. The side drape is made with the rayon wool blend that I used for my navy strapless dress, the silk edging is left over lining from the same navy strapless dress, the corset was made with left over red & navy silk (which was interfaced, prior to sewing) & the dress lining was made with left over fabric from the skirt of this dress. So turns out it was worth keeping all those random remnants & fabric scraps.

As well as using up a lot of old remnants, this dress was also a bit of a franken pattern creation. The main bodice is from Simplicity 2639, the skirt is from Vogue V1174 & it’s all held in place with an internal corset made using Simplicity 5006. All three patterns have had a pretty good workout over the past 3-4 years & well & have well & truly cemented themselves in my ‘go-to’ collection.

The construction process was a little adhoc. I started with the corset. The corset was made as per the pattern & I added spiral steel boning.

Next was the bodice & dress lining, I modified the neckline of bodice pattern (Simplicity 2639) to match the neckline of the corset pattern (Simplicty 5006), because it’s a softer sweetheart neckline & I prefer it. I cut out the dress bodice & I put the bodice pieces together & attached it to the corset & lining.

The next step was to add the silk ribbon that runs around the top of the bodice. Rather than drafting up a pattern, I put the bodice on a dummy, arranged the navy silk ribbon the way I wanted it, pinned it in place & then slip stitched it in place.

Last of all was the skirt. I made up the skirt from V1174. The only alteration I made was to eliminate the pockets. The skirt was stitched in place on the bodice and then I hand stitched the drape in place. The drape is just a rectangle of fabric gathered at the side.

All in all, the dress came together relatively easily & without any major dramas, which is kind of surprising since I didn’t really do a good job of planning it out.

P.S. In case you’re still wondering why this dress was the fabric’s fault, read yesterday’s post.

Have you walked in to take a closer look, spent a good 5 mins looking at it, before walking around the store pretending to look at other things while really all your thinking is, ‘I don’t need that fabric, I have heaps at home, but it’s really nice, AND it would make the most beautiful dress, but I don’t need it & I shouldn’t buy things I don’t need….’

Then you leave the store.

Without the fabric.

Then you spend the next month thinking of nothing but that fabric, how beautiful it is, how if you had it you could make the most beautiful dress in the world, you should have bought it, you’re a fool for not buying it, I bet if you go back the store now, you’ll kick yourself because someone else would have bought it all because it’s so nice.

Then you’re walking past the fabric store again, 6 weeks later & you see that the fabric you’ve been obsessing over is still there! So you buy it without even thinking.

No? That hasn’t happened to you? Are you sure?

Well, this happened to me at the beginning of the year, with this stunning navy & red silk brocade.

I saw it in Clegs at the beginning of the year & I think I spent about 6 weeks obsessing about it, before I actually went back & bought it. I was so glad it was still there!

I have since made this into a dress that I absolutely adore… but more on that tomorrow.

So, here’s the post…

You know how some days you just feel like make a new dress for the hell of it? Well that’s how I felt the other weekend, and here’s the dress I made.

I made it using Vogue V1287. It’s not the style of dress that I would normally wear, but I quite like it. It’s super comfortable & dressy enough to wear to work & then out to drinks afterwards. The only complaint I have is that this pattern is it seems to have a lot more ease than I would prefer. Maybe it’s just because I’m not used to wearing dresses in this style, but the waistband felt massive. By the time I realised, the dress was pretty much sewn & it wasn’t going to easy to fix it properly, so I just shortened the piece of elastic in the back. It fit better but it means the pockets are slightly offset to the back & it looks a bit awkward if I’m standing around with my hands in my pockets. Though my mother would probably argue I shouldn’t be standing around with my hands in my pockets to begin with

On a side note, this fabric was a NIGHTMARE to sew with. It is super slippery, impossible to press a fold into & it has just enough stretch in it to make you crazy. Seriously. I can see why this one was on the $2 table. Because it was on the $2 table I bought a silly amount of it (4m) so I still have a couple of metres left, no idea what I’m going to do with it.

Hmmm…

Yep 13 months on and I still have no idea what I’m going to do with that fabric.

This is just because sometimes I want to sew something that can be finished quickly & isn’t too much of a challenge. Some times it works out quite well, for a relatively small amount of effort I finish something & that gives me enough motivation & energy to get back to the larger long term project. Other times it’s a disaster & I get totally distracted & end up with not just one long term nightmare, but two.

This dress started off it’s life as a simple side project that I could finish quickly & then get back onto my main project. It was going to be a simple dress with a long flared skirt. I wanted something that I could ‘relax with a martini’ in. Something I could dress up with heels & go out to cocktails in or dress down. I’d bought the printed chiffon fabric ages ago from Gorgeous Fabrics & recently bought some silk crepe underlining at The Fabric Store while out shopping with some other Melbourne sewing bloggers. I started sewing. The bodice came together quite nicely – I just used a basic block bodice pattern with a new neckline. But then it came time to make the skirt & it soon turned into one disaster (mistake) after another that resulted in one band aid after another until I somehow managed to end up with a somewhat wearable dress.

The first problem (and really the source of all my woe) was that I was too lazy to actually draft a skirt pattern. In fact it wasn’t just that I was too lazy to draft the pattern, I actually like the drafting bit. But I didn’t have any thin paper pieces big enough so I would have had to tape them together & that just seemed like way too much fuss & bother so I just decided to cut out the pieces of fabric for the skirt without a pattern. I just used a ruler to roughly measure out what I wanted. But when I went to mark out the cut lines with my chalk pen I found that it didn’t work properly on the chiffon, because it kept moving around & I couldn’t be bothered going to the store to buy fabric stabiliser because last time I was there they didn’t have any & the staff were non-existent & when you did find someone they didn’t even know what I was talking about. Anyway these are all my lame excuses for why I then proceeded to just cut out skirt pattern pieces freehand.

I think you now know how this story is going to end…

It wasn’t long before I discovered that the skirt panels weren’t wide enough at the waist. And not just by a little – it was a lot. Then I discovered that I didn’t have enough fabric to cut out an extra panel to ‘plug’ the gap I had around my waist. Thankfully I’d given the skirt panels a fairly generous length (my shoes that I wanted to wear with the dress hadn’t arrived in the mail yet so I wasn’t too sure of length when I cut the fabric). In the end I managed to move the waist lower down in the panels, reduce the seam allowances between skirt panels & change the the lower hem to a teeny tiny hem. Even then it was a bit of a tight fit so I still had to try & squeeze an extra panel out of the scraps of fabric I had left. Eventually I found a way to make it work.

So in summary, the source of all my problems with this dress was that I was too lazy to tape a couple of pieces of paper together & then draw out a basic skirt pattern. Seriously.

For all my moping I should say that I’m actually quite happy with this dress. My one big complaint is the location of the seam lines at the waistline at the front of the skirt, they’re just too close together & I wish I could have widened that panel a little at the top. Other than that, it really worked out quite well.

First I cut out a piece of fabric (that based on my early sketches & calculations would be big enough). I drafted a basic front & back bodice & drew in my desired neckline. Then I used this to cut out the neckline for the top.

Next I added some stability to the neckline. In hindsight I should have done this before cutting. I cut out a strip of tulle in the shape of the neckline & attached it to the neckline. This was ok & held the neckline in place, but it was itchy & I later found that it didn’t provided enough support for the crystal trim so I ended up modifying this stabilisation later on (but more on that another time).

The next step was to drape the top on my dress makers dummy. Once the neckline was positioned correctly (& pinned in place) I started to pin in place the bust darts.

I did the same for the rear darts & marked the side seam locations.

To get the length right, I tied a ribbon around the dummy where I wanted my waist seam to be & then cut 15mm below that. Simple!

Once all of that was done I took the top off the dummy, marked where the darts were & lay it flat on the table. Then I measured where the side seams should finish & the sleeves should start & cut the fabric (sorry no pics of this step as it was just a bit hashed together). That was the top done.

The skirt overlay used the same pattern as the under dress just a size larger.

Last but not least the pieces for the skirt & sleeve ‘trails’. I started by going back to my sketches & making some more estimates/calcs. Then I started drafting. The big skirt trail was tricky because I had to work within the 110cm wide silk & still place the seam lines so that they looked nice. In the end I was able to pick a line that allowed me to use the same pattern piece for the side panels of the skirt trail and the sleeve trails.

I drafted a rectangle that needed to contain the trails within & then drew the hem line freehand. It took me a while to settle on a good line (as you can see by the large number of lines on the page).

This paper pattern was then used to cut out the fabric and that was all the patterns done for the overlay.

OK so the photo was taken at night & the lighting isn’t that great, AND the overlay is in dire need of a good press but I’m really happy with how this dress is progressing. Here’s what I have left to do;

1. Make another shorter version of the sash which will be used to make a bow at the back of the dress
2. Add closures to the sash/bow
3. Finish stitching the crystal trim to the neckline
4. Add crystal trim to the sleeves

Funny… In my mind it seemed like a lot more work. but when I list it out here it doesn’t seem like much at all!

I’m exhausted. This dress is killing me.

I spent almost all day today making teeny tiny hems all over the dress. I added it up, I had to do over 25m of teeny tiny hems. This dress uses a deceptively large amount of chiffon and it requires SO MANY HEMS.

Also, today I found out I’m really really bad at sewing french seams with chiffon. How did I find out? Well I had to re-sew almost every french seam in the skirt because the first time I did it the seam allowances were too big & then the skirt didn’t fit.

After all this I think you can kind of understand why I didn’t really feel like taking any progress photos this afternoon.

I did do some work on the dress earlier in the week, that didn’t leave me utterly exhausted so I thought I’d post a bit about that.

The sash on the original dress is heavily gathered. I decided to do something slightly different & ended up with a bit of a pleated look. I started by cutting out some rectangles of fabric. The white interfacing is the thickness of the sash I wanted, the silk is double that plus seam allowances & the chiffon is triple the width of the interfacing plus seam allowances.

I started by adhering the interfacing to the silk & then sewing the chiffon to the top of the interfacing.

Then I folded the chiffon back on itself to hide the raw edge.

Then I started to pleat the fabric by hand & pin it in place. Then I handstitched it all in place. As you can imagine this took FOREVER.

Finally I finished.

I’m tantalisingly close to finishing the dress now. I just have to add the closures (I still haven’t worked out exactly what to do here) & the trim.

This is the under dress on the dress form. I haven’t hemmed it yet (waiting for my new gold shoes to arrive in the mail), but other than that it’s almost done. I used Simplicity 2639 for the dress. I also made an internal corset to hold the dress up.

The internal corset is made with the same pattern as the dress (just chopped off a lot shorter) & cut one size smaller. It wasn’t the most exact or perfect way to do it but it was quick & easy to do. I also finished the top of the corset with the same fabric as the dress so that it would match.

I think the corset is a little long though & hits at the hip so the ends of the bones read through the dress, (you can see it in the picture below). I think I’m going to shorten the corset to finish at a narrower part of me. Hopefully it won’t read through any more after that…