Last spring in Berlin I picked up some digital print panels at the itinerant fabric market. It took me a while to work out what to do with them. There is a main feature print placed in a spot on the panel that is probably meant to go at the front of a top or short dress. Boob territory, so to speak, which is not my favourite spot for a ‘look here’ feature. Plus I wanted a maxi dress instead of something shorter, so this is my first try with one of those panels.
It wasn’t easy, and in the end, after a lot of furious frowning and wrinkling of brows, I decided to put the eye feature a bit lower down, high over my stomach. Very appropriate, as I indeed tend to see with my stomach. 🙂
So that was fine for the front. The back turned out to be the bigger headache and there was no way to get a back on that dress without piecing it. Sometimes you can get away with that pieced seam being hardly noticeable, but not this time, due to the colour variation across the panel. The upper section is so very obviously different from the lower.
I think I might experiment with the off-cuts and see if I can bleach some spots into the dark brown upper back section to make it blend in a bit more with the speckled lower one. Or maybe I should leave well enough alone. I have worn the dress several times since making it, so it hasn’t annoyed me that much.
The fabric is a cotton jersey and the pattern is a blend between my favourite tee (no longer available) and the Tessuti Lily dress for the skirt part. I had to reduce the width a bit at the hem to make it fit the panel and lengthen it by about 15cm. An easier way would have been to use the long version of the Tessuti Frankie dress pattern.
Linked to MMM.