From Eva to Iris

I might have mentioned before that the Eva dress by Tessuti is one of my all time favourites. I have been sewing it for years and one of the summer versions I made a few years ago needed replacing.

I have seen the Eva made up successfully in prints, but I think it is best suited to plain fabric to show off the top stitched seams. I had some medium weight linen marinating in my stash that fit the bill nicely. It is a light-ish indigo, just a little more purple than a straight dark blue. I pretty much love all shades of purple, especially the more subtle ones. Purple suits redheads almost as much as grey.

So here is the result.

 

 

If you are interested in the sewing details, they are on PatternReview.

On a roll, I decided I wanted another summer dress. It is so hot at the moment and dresses are definitely the coolest option for work wear. Cotton batik is a superb choice for hot weather, cool and not as high maintenance as linen can be, and I had a lovely piece that I bought as a remnant from a roll of sheeting. It was only 85cm, but 2.8m wide, so enough for a dress. I would have been tempted to make another Eva, as the painterly batik was different enough to the plain linen not to be too obvious, and with the flowing colours there was no problem with an awkwardly chopped up print, but unfortunately the Eva is a little fabric hungry and there was no way to cut it efficiently from such a narrow and long piece.

So I had a look for a pattern I could use, and found the Iris dress, which is a variation of the Eva.

The bodice looks the same, but the skirt only has one horizontal seam. A four-piece skirt produces less fabric waste than one with eight, and as I am rather keen on bubble shapes at the moment it was settled.

Unfortunately I had not planned ahead, and had taken my printer to work. I was far too lazy to go in just to print off the pattern. What to do? I thought I could modify the Eva pattern enough to make the Iris, which is probably what Tessuti had done in the first place.

Bad idea! I did get there is the end, but it took me a lot longer than it would have with a proper pattern. For a start I sewed the bottom skirt piece in upside down, not the end of the world but I only discovered this after I had overlocked and top stitched the seams. Both front and back! Unpicking long seams with multiple rows of stitching is only recommended if you like boring hand work and have oodles of time you want to kill. 🙂

The second problem was that I made the bodice with too much ease. This was ok with the Eva dress, because it is quite long and the proportions are different. Even though the Eva is a bubble, it is not particularly voluminous. The Iris bubble is wider before it goes back in, as the top half of the skirt flares out more because it is longer, at least it is in my version. I would be interested to know if this is the case with the Tessuti pattern as well, so I will be buying it to have a look. Judging by the pictures, my bottom skirt piece is narrower, making the dress shorter. This was due to fabric constraints, but I quite like the shorter look.  Unfortunately it all added up to make the silhouette quite square, courtesy of the loose bodice on top of everything else. So more unpicking. I took a total of 7cm out of the bodice width, quite a lot, but it now looks much better. I can still get it on and off without a closure, always good news as far as I am concerned.

I ditched the short sleeves I had been toying with, again because they made the top of the dress look too wide. I think a deep U neckline might have helped make the bodice look less square, but I had already finished it with a self bias and I had well and truly enough of unpicking. The original Iris pattern had a little stand up collar which I rather like, but I have so many necklaces that I feel I need lots of clothes with plain round necklines to get some wear out of all this jewellery.

 

 

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A Bubble Dress

Now that I feel that I have done Lagenlook to death, I am casting around for a new style. Time to experiment a bit! My latest is the StyleArc Eme dress, rather a change for me because, even though it is still oversized, it is much shorter than my usual length. Just below the knee. Gulp.

 

I do like it. I had planned to wear this with leggings, but decided to be brave and just go ahead the way it is. I felt totally comfortable with the shorter length, a bit of a first for me. The only thing that makes me hesitate is that I am rather used to tight-ish fitting bodices and this one is very loose. I cut the size according to the StyleArc size chart, but I still feel I could go down a size. Or two.

It could be that I need to acclimatise to the change. What do you think? I might wear it for Christmas, it certainly is roomy enough to accommodate an enormous lunch, and see what the fashion police, aka DD has to say. If it is a thumbs down it would be really easy to take in the underarm and side seam a little. Or a lot, depending.

Your candid comments would really be appreciated.

The sewing nitty-gritty is as usual on PatternReview.

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Several months later
I did take it in and here is what it looks like now. Not sure if it was worth it, but I am still wearing it. The left is before and the right is the after shot. I think maybe I should have taken it in over the hips too, not just the bodice. It’s not too late, there might be a next iteration!

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Block-Printed Toni

The StyleArc Toni Designer dress is one of my favourite patterns, although I dispense with the collar and pare it down to its basic silhouette. I have posted about other versions of this dress here, here and here.

This time I wanted to make a long sleeve version, using a lovely cotton jersey that would be a great canvas for a bit of block printing. I used the same motif as for this t-shirt, except for mirroring it into a sort of abstract leaf shape.

I am very happy with the design, although the actual execution leaves a bit to be desired. This is due to the nature of block printing, where every print looks somewhat different and none of them are perfect, most with random bits where the ink didn’t quite cover. This is unlike stencilling which has a more solid application of the ink, but is more difficult to use on large areas such as a nearly maxi dress. Still, the block print seen as a whole doesn’t look too bad and close up the unevenness of the prints has a certain artisan charm. You can tell it hasn’t been done by a machine, at least that’s my story and I intend to stick to it. 🙂

But looking at the photos, I really ought to slim down the width of the bodice a bit, when I compare it to the dark grey version below, which has a more pleasing overall shape, because it looks quite tight below the bust and only flares out from there.

The two dresses are actually cut identical, but the lighter grey jersey is not as drapey as the darker. Or is it the large print that makes the difference? It has been a truism as long as I can remember that large scale prints are only for the super-skinny, but aesthetically I just like large prints so much better than small ones. It is a trade-off, but fortunately seeking to look as slim as possible is no longer my top priority when designing my clothes. Still, there is scope to slim done the bodice, and I will try it as soon as i can find the time and see if it will do the trick.

To get a winter version of the Toni, I combined it with my TNT t-shirt pattern, the Burda Lydia, for the upper part of the bodice and also used the long sleeves from that pattern. The sewing details are on PatternReview.

An Eva in Winter

Our kitchen reno is dragging on. Three weeks ago it was 90% finished, but then we had a slew of social and work commitments: grandchildren’s birthdays, weekend away we promised my daughter’s family ages ago, unreasonable customers demanding things on weekends. Everything slowed to a crawl. Now we are 95% finished, but have come to a screeching halt over the colour of the walls. I bought the paint a while ago, feeling quite confident that I did not need to do any tests to get the right colour.

Well, that was a mistake. I picked quite a dark shade of gray, being a bit bored with light, wishy-washy colours. But gray can be tricky, with undertones of blue, green or yellow. The gray I chose is too blue, making my cupboard fronts look somewhat beige in comparison. Grrr! So back to the drawing board regarding the paint. I will need to get a few sample pots after all to get it right.

In the meantime I thought I might do a quick sewing post, to keep my blog warm so to speak. 🙂

I might have mentioned before that I have made one of my all-time favourite dresses, the Tessuti Eva, in a Ponte for colder weather, and I happened to have a few photos I took ages ago. Winter is just about finished in the Southern Hemisphere, but those of you living in the northern half of the planet will be starting to think of autumn sewing.

The pattern is for a woven, but that only matters for the bodice. To adapt it to the knit, I merged the bodice of the Eva with the armscyes and long sleeves from my TNT t-shirt pattern, the Burda Lydia. The latter is unfortunately no longer free, but at $1.99 it is still a bargain, at least for those of us who don’t have access to the $1 sales of the Big 4. It is a great classic t-shirt pattern, very well drafted as you would expect from Burda.

Beware that Ponte is heavy, there is a lot of fabric in the skirt and this stretches the bodice downwards. That makes it especially important to shorten the bodice if you are not tall, or the proportions will be off. I am 161cm and take 5cm off the bottom of the bodice if I am using heavy, stretchy fabrics, which is about right for me. Because the bottom of the bodice is curved this also takes a few cm off the circumference and you need to adjust the top of the skirt accordingly.

I don’t adjust the skirt part for my height, or lack thereof, as I quite like the finished length.

TNT Dress With Variation

TNT stands for Tried ‘n True, a pattern that you have used over and over and know that it works for you. Not merely from a fitting point of view, but also because it looks good on you, and you like wearing that kind of garment because you feel comfortable in it, and it suits your way of life. As a bonus, using mostly TNT patterns, the colours that look good on you and the sort of prints you like, will result in a strong personal style. So what’s not to like?

I rely heavily on TNT patterns and rarely sew with anything else. This makes it possible for me to sew as fast, if not faster, than I could buy RTW. Not always of course, a special occasion dress or a jacket or coat will take longer. But my steady diet of separates and the occasional simple dress can be made in a few hours, no longer than it would take me to drive to a shopping centre, cruise the shops, try on a heap of garments, despair about the quality, feel bad about my figure and end up with an expensive compromise. And make no mistake, any garment, other than perhaps a tee-shirt, that is not made entirely of polyester WILL be expensive.

Much more rewarding to pull out a TNT pattern, shop my stash of cottons, linens wools and silks, spend a couple of enjoyable hours at my sewing machine and end up with something that will fit and look good, at least to my way of thinking. My non-mainstream style is not everybody’s cup of tea, but then it doesn’t have to be. As long as I feel good in what I have made, my mission is accomplished!

Any TNT pattern is of course open to all sorts of variations to keep things interesting and adapt to the seasons. Here is the latest iteration of the dress pattern I discussed in my last post, a little bit more cold weather friendly with warmer fabric and a cowl instead of the V-neck. This time I also left off the CF and CB seams. But again it is based on my favourite tee-shirt pattern, with the front and back pattern pieces lengthened to a midi length dress. I kept the side splits, so this has to be worn over an under-dress, or a pair of pants, or possibly over a skirt. I haven’t tried this yet, but I will.

The sewing nitty-gritty is as usual on Pattern Review.

The fabric is a heavy cotton velour knit bought at Clear-It in Melbourne maybe 10 years ago. I bought a lot of it because it was only $1/m and have made other garments using it which I have worn and worn. It is a lovely quality, very comfortable, washes up like a dream and is warm as well. Who says you can’t save money sewing? The dress would have taken a bit under 2m of the velour (less than $2) and 3 hours of a rainy Sunday afternoon to sew. As a bonus it goes really well with my me-made jade and silver necklace.

 

A New TNT Dress Pattern for Winter

I think I have mentioned before that I don’t sew based on patterns. What I mean by that is that I don’t browse the offerings of pattern companies, pick one that appeals to me and sew it up. I find that way of building a wardrobe ends up being deeply unsatisfying.

Why? Because what I want is a stylish new outfit, not a pattern. And because I am not a genius it is much easier to find a look online that I really love and try to recreate it, than to invent something from scratch based on a pattern. Especially since most pattern companies are rather pedestrian as designers and fixated on making patterns ‘interesting’, so as many people as possible will buy them, not on creating exciting fashion.

So when I browse Pinterest and other online sources and come across an outfit I love, I have a close look at how I can recreate it. Sometimes I will conclude that it is too difficult, but often I can figure out how to find a pattern or adapt one I already have to do the job. I keep a board of these inspiration pieces and the vast majority of them never get made, but it helps me calibrate my personal style, and browsing my board usually motivates me when my sewing mojo is a bit blah.

Ironically, my latest attempt is of an outfit created by a pattern company, on the front page of Tina Given’s new pattern magazine. But then Tina Givens is a fashion designer turned pattern company, not the other way around. Her patterns are pedestrian but her outfits always look great.

This time I would have been very happy to go buy the pattern, a rare luxury to be able to do that when I see an outfit I want, but after scouring Tina Given’s website I found the mag is no longer available, or at least I could not figure out how to get my hands on it. So after a good look I decided that this dress is just a long sleeve t-shirt with a seam at CF and CB, and extended to maxi length with slits from about the hip down. My trusty TNT t-shirt pattern would easily be up for it. So below, allowing for the much less glamorous model and the lack of stylist and fashion photographer to create the perfect photo, is a good look at my first version.

 

There is some room for improvement with the V-neck not being quite as low as it should be. I am not used to making them, preferring round necks as a whole, and I was too conservative when cutting out. 5cm lower would have been better. Other than that I am pretty happy. Fabric restrictions meant that the dress is shorter in length than the original, so I left the four sections at different length according to what the available fabric would allow. I rather like the result.

The cupro viscose I used is not as beefy as the knit of the Tina Givens original, but it has been in my stash for yonks, and I am glad I found a good use for it. This style of dress would look good too in a heavier knit, or a Ponte or even a merino, so watch this space for more. It makes for a very comfy outfit, like going to work in your nighty, and is easily varied with different scarves and jackets or cardis. I think this will be my new TNT pattern for winter, with and without the CF and CB seams, and with and without a cowl. Seems I am transitioning to a slimmer version of Lagenlook to go with my slimmer body. For more detailed sewing instructions have a look at my write-up on PatternReview.

The under-dress is a Tessuti Lily dress, with long sleeves and lengthened to a maxi, which has been an orphan in my wardrobe for at least 5 years. It is too plain to be worn on its own, but I always knew it would come in handy one day.  🙂

The Eva Dress on the Straight and Narrow

 

I have used the Eva bodice and sleeves for so many of my frankenpattern projects, and yet I don’t believe I have ever shown an Eva dress sewn as the designer intended it to look. Let me fix that today!

 

These are the very first Eva dresses I ever made, one sleeveless and the other with short sleeves. The red is a fairly hefty linen, originally a tangerine/peach and later, when it began to look a bit washed out, overdyed to cranberry red. The grey was my wearable muslin, repurposed from an old doona cover my son left behind when he first moved out of home to go overseas and work in Amsterdam. I missed him, but that I cut up his bed linen to wear because of that is a vicious rumour!  🙂

Anyway, the doona cover originally came from the ‘As Is’ bin at IKEA, so using it for the, at that time, still untried Eva pattern was not a huge gamble in financial terms. It is quite a nice light grey cotton jacquard, a little discoloured from wear in certain places, but there was plenty of fabric to cut around those areas. I believe there may even be still enough left for a pair of pants, but that is a project for another day.

I made this version of the Eva straight out of the packet as far as the pattern is concerned, although of course it was a PDF, so no packet involved. The only changes I made was to forego the bias bound hem at the bottom and the sleeves. A narrow, topstitched hem is very doable despite the curves. Besides extra fabric, bias tape takes time and effort, and I felt I had expended quite enough of that with all the piecing and topstitching required for the skirt sections. I even made the pockets, which I don’t use of course. I never use pockets, unlike a lot of other people who find them indispensable. For me they are only indispensable for forgetting the odd used tissue in, which then causes me hassles in the wash, so I usually leave them off.

I really like the result. The grey jacquard looks quite classy ( — ok, so it is an old doona cover but nobody need ever know!) and it suits the lovely lines of the Eva very well.

 

The dark red Eva is quite a heavy linen and hardly crushes at all since I overdyed it. Score! I should overdye a few more linens to get that effect!

Details about the sewing process are on Pattern Review.

In Stripes from Head to Toe

Although I like stripes I haven’t worn them much lately. This dress is an exception and, being a maxi, the stripes are pretty much all over. The black and grey combo has a bit of a Japanese vibe, at least as far as the colours are concerned. Japanese people seem to like a very subdued colour scheme of black, grey and white, with black and white checks being a particular favourite. I once took a JAL flight to Osaka and as I was standing in the boarding queue I noticed that pretty much everyone was wearing black, grey and white, with the exception of one brave rebel who wore a purple dress. No doubt everyone thought her outrageous!

Black and grey are also very much colours for autumn, although summer is hanging on stubbornly here and we are still having temps of over 30 for a few days this week. Today was a bit cooler, so I thought I might make a start digging out the autumn wardrobe. I hear New Zealand is already having snow, so it won’t be long before we will need our woollies here too. It usually takes a week or so for the weather to cross the ditch (the Tasman Sea between NZ and Australia, for those not familiar with the term).

I have used this pattern quite a few times before and have blogged about it here. The basic shape of front and back looks like this, cut on the fold, with the back neck line higher than the front, of course.

I based the above on a t-shirt pattern for the bodice, then did the rest based on a pattern found in a magazine. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I later found the StyleArc Toni Designer Dress pattern to be much the same basic shape if you ignore the collar detail and centre seams, although it is a bit wider in the bodice. Good for wovens but for knits I prefer to overlay the Toni pattern with t-shirt pattern at the top to make it narrower in the shoulders and bust. I have explained this in detail on Pattern Review here.

When wearing the dress you can tuck in the pointy bits or just leave them to hang on the outside. I prefer to tuck mine in a fair way. The skirt sort of collapses into interesting folds. Sorry it is not very easily visible with the dark colour, which is why you might want to look at the dresses in this earlier post too.

I have blogged about a sleeveless summer version made with a cotton woven fabric here.

Dyed and Reborn

I am not a great believer in reincarnation, except when it comes to fabric in the dye pot. Many a tired looking garment or unpromising piece of fabric has experienced a chemical rebirth in my kitchen over the years and been all the better for it. This dress is a case in point. The crepe de chine is quite luscious, but started life as a rather insipid black and white print. Insipid because the white was not a really a bright optical white which I think is essential for a black and white combination to look good. And so it languished in my stash until I decided that what it really wanted to be was an electric blue.

However, if you want a happy dyeing experience it is really important to use  good quality dyes. If it is done right, your dyed garments will look good for a long time and not fade or run in the wash.  I use fibre reactive dyes and have written about the details of the process in earlier posts here and here.

I only had 2m of the crepe de chine and it was a border print as well, which did not leave a lot of room to manoeuvre. I fell back on my favourite dress style for border prints, a semi-fitted empire bodice and a pleated skirt. The skirt is a rectangle, pleated to fit the bodice, with a flange to cover the join. A 2m wide skirt is not very twirlable, 3m would have been better, but it had to do. In any case I don’t have a lot of occasions to twirl about in my very ordinary everyday life. 🙂

For the bodice I decided on an ancient pattern piece that has just the right amount of ease to slip into without needing a closure, which I have used many times because that is such a boon. I have no problem with installing zippers, but not needing one does away with having to find one that matches, and the additional ease of the looser bodice makes for great wearing comfort. Inconveniently the old pattern did not come with sleeves, so I needed to hybridise it with the Eva dress armscyes to use the short sleeves from that pattern. Last year I hated short sleeves and this year I can’t get enough of them, go figure.

For a more detailed description of the sewing process, have a look at my write-up on Pattern Review.

So here is the dress. The last photo shows it teamed with a Ponte bolero which is very practical during the change of season and I will blog about it soon.

My camera is back in action, which means I can take photos again in my favourite spot in front of my (– imprisoned because of the freeloading beasties –) herb patch. With my phone the brightness of the garden behind did not work at all, although as you can see from the last photo, when the sun comes out in the middle of the day the camera does not cope either. But at least at either end of the day, or when it is overcast, I can again take my pictures in this convenient spot where the neighbours can’t see me prancing about in front of the camera, and it is a bit nicer than my bathroom door as a backdrop.

Bubble Dress Mark II

So I had another go at perfecting my bubble dress. This one is frankenpatterned using two Tessuti patterns, the Eva bodice and the Lily skirt part.

Instead of cutting the bodice and upper skirt in one piece as I did with the last bubble dress, I decided on a separate empire bodice, fitted, but just loose enough for me to be able to slip the dress over my head without needing a zipper. For the rest I thought the circular upper skirt and inverted circular lower skirt were still basically a sound solution. The addition of an inverted box pleat at CF and CB would control the volume below the bust but release it lower down for the skirt. This proved to be quite a good approach. For variety I also added some short sleeves, just a little longer in length than a cap sleeve.

The picture above shows the copied off skirt piece from the Lily. Any voluminous A-line skirt will do, or if you are confident you can draft it yourself. This will become the upper part of the skirt.  The bottom circumference is around 65cm. Cut this out twice for front and back on the fold. I actually place  the pattern piece about 5cm away from the fold to make the skirt even more voluminous. (You need to do this both with the upper and lower pattern piece, to keep the circumferences where you are going to join both pieces the same.)

Then you draw a line 30cm parallel to the bottom edge and cut along this. You can see in the photo below where I have already done this, resulting in a wide piece which is flipped over vertically and will become the lower part of the skirt. I have tapered this inwards at the side seams and added 16 tucks around the hem, clustered both sides of the side seams, to take it in further. I think I should have used deeper darts, not just tucks. Elastic would have done a similar job, just more evenly all around. I might do that next time.

As I have already mentioned, I made the upper edge of the skirt fit the lower bodice edge by means of a very deep inverted box pleat. While I was sewing this I was a little worried that it might result in the dreaded pregnant look, but having tried it on I don’t think so. Ironically no pregnant women wants to be seen dead in a smock these days, everyone is determined to show that they are still slim above and below the bulge. Not a problem, leave the smocks to those of us who want to be cool and comfortable!

I must say I am rather pleased with the result of this experiment, it looks very much like I have a new TNT. The only further improvements I can think of is deeper hem darts and perhaps a flange at the bottom of the empire bodice, but the latter is not essential. The linen I used has a loose-ish weave and so the empire seam turned out slightly shaped, being pulled down at CF by the weight of the box pleat. You could call it wonky but I rather like the effect.

Talking of the linen, it started life as a remnant of a boring cross weave in light yellow and cream. After an encounter with my dye pot is is a nice textured turquoise. I think I may have been naughty and did not wash it properly prior to dyeing, because it didn’t take the colour all that well, but there was enough fabric to cut around the streaks and lighter patches and it looks quite respectable.

I was also worried it would be the kind of linen you have to iron every time you want to wear it, and still it would look like a rag after a couple of hours, but it is actually not too bad. I took some of the photos at the end of a work day and it looks ok.

I am still searching for a good spot to take decent photos. The garden looks nicest, but the mozzies are fierce right now and they really love me. So eventually I had to retreat back to the bathroom. Better luck next time.

 

 

 

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