Pointy With A Twist

I have made several versions of this dress already, all winter versions using knits, either jersey or ponte.

For the dresses above I used a pattern I found in an Italian pattern magazine years ago, and adapted to fit me better by using a TNT t-shirt for the bodice part. Then I discovered the Toni designer dress by StyleArc and downloaded a copy, so I would not have to fiddle around with cutting from a previous dress overlaid with a t-shirt pattern. I still have to fiddle if I want long sleeves, as the Toni is sleeveless with extended shoulders, but for a summer version I can cut straight from the pattern (- with a couple of modifications of course, as always!).

Below is what the pattern pieces look like:

My summer versions both use woven fabrics, both crinkle linen, although the green seems to be a linen mixture rather than pure linen and is quite stable despite the slight crinkle. The black is softer, more stretchy and crinkly, and also quite sheer.

Serendipity took a hand in the creation when sewing up the green dress below. I happened to try it on for fit with the seams below the side pointy tip still open. When I looked in the mirror I liked what I saw, and the result are two Toni dresses with open lower side seams. I also put a cuff on the extended shoulders to make a short sleeve.

For the second summer version I decided I wanted bracelet length sleeves, wide enough to roll up, and so I overlaid the body of the Toni once again with the armscyes from another pattern, this time suitable for wovens, and used the matching sleeves.

I think this dress turned out a little long, as the crinkle linen seems to have expanded. Next time I have black thread in my machine I might just chop a bit off the bottom and re-hem.

 

And all ready to go out with scarf and bag.

 

 

The Poppy Shirt

I am enjoying wearing my Poppy shirts, made using this Tina Givens pattern.

The Poppy is not your average shirt, but really a tunic, with no collar or cuffs, no buttons and cut on sleeves. In other words, quick and easy to make, ideal for lazy sewists like me. I can have a new one ready in less time than it would take me to go to the shops and buy something. To say nothing of the price.

I have made two versions of the Poppy so far, but only the one below with the front split as high as intended by the pattern. This version is best worn with another tunic underneath.

I used a sheeting cotton which drapes quite well and is easy to wear as it doesn’t wrinkle much. Not an outfit for high summer because of the 3/4 sleeves and several layers, but good for in between seasons.

The second version below has a modified split that doesn’t come up nearly as high and can be worn over just my usual cotton tank top. The fabric is cotton sateen, a little thicker than the sheeting. I added a stand up collar this time.

An ikat fabric or something ethnic would look good with this pattern, but I’m not sure if I would like the Poppy in a plain fabric. I think it would have to be something really special to look good, something understatedly expensive. I don’t have anything to hand right now that would fit this bill, but I will make this pattern up a couple more times when I find fabric right for it, either patterned or plain, because I really like wearing these shirts.

BTW, both fabrics I used for my existing versions were over-dyed. The grey started life as an insipid light blue. I bought it online and was very disappointed when it arrived, as what I thought was a jacquard turned out to be only a cheap and nasty print. My fault for assuming! It looks much nicer after a bath in Drimarene K black (Procion would have been fine too).

The green was bought in person, so to speak, during a period in my sewing life where only black and white would do. Once the infatuation passed I was left with a lot of B/W fabric I no longer fancied. Fortunately, courtesy of a mix of blue, black and yellow Drimarene K, the white was easily over-dyed and I am much happier with the green. 🙂

 

The Michele Oka Doner Dress

On occasion I have heard some of my women friends say that they  wished they could just wear a uniform, to make daily dressing and getting out the door easier. Something flattering and easy care, that they know will look good and of which they have a never ending (and preferably perfectly ironed) supply. I personally could live in silk harem pants and loose tunics, although I wear all sorts of other things too.

But I heard of an artist, a sculptor, who literally wears the same dress, in different colours and fabrics, all the time. Apparently she once bought the original dress in a shop and liked it so much that she kept getting it copied from then on. Her name is Michele Oka Doner. Here is an article about here and her work.

She looks pretty good, doesn’t she? I love her work too, you should google it and have a look. While I don’t think I would have the discipline to stick to one perfect dress for years and years, I wouldn’t mind just one copy of her dress for myself.

As luck would have it, I had just the right pattern in my stash. I found it years ago in an Italian magazine and have used it several times, but the mag is probably in pattern mag heaven by now.  If you want to get your hands on something similar, the StyleArc Toni Designer dress below is very close.

The tutorial on how to shorten it shows the pattern pieces:

To make the Michelle Oka Doner dress you need to take out the centre front seam and make a simple round neck instead of the collar. You also need to add the arm scyes and sleeves from a pattern that fits you well in that area. Here are a couple of my own previous versions.

For the cowl I made a trapeze shape, self lined, about the width of my shoulders at the bottom and considerably narrower towards the top. The fabric is an off white ponte. It will show the dirt like crazy, but winter white is so dressy and a good colour for me too. I wore the dress for a big zero birthday party and felt very chic.   🙂

After I published this post Harriet Snow commented that the Tina Givens Iris pattern is also very close, or a ‘dead ringer’ as they say in Australia. This gives anyone wanting to make it another option. The sleeves are cut on in this version, which by necessity makes the bodice looser at the top. I prefer a closer fit in this area, but the Tina Givens version is undeniably closer to the original.

And a look at the pattern pieces:

 

From Skirt to Dress

I really love this Marcy Tilton skirt.

You can read my previous blog posts out it here and see a couple of my versions below.

  

But I always thought that this skirt shape would make an awesome bottom part to a dress. I had 3m of a cheap cotton bought at a Spotlight sale on hand, so I thought why not give it a try?

The bodice part of the dress would have to be simple, with all the drama and volume going on lower down. So I used my trusty Eva dress bodice again, my go-to pattern which fits me well in the shoulders, armscyes and bust, and combined it with the skirt part lower down. There was a fair bit of winging-it going on in the middle, as you can see from the photo.

The Eva pattern piece, traced on paper because you need the full version, not just half with an assymmetric pattern, placed on one end, and the main pattern piece of the skirt on the other. A lot of fudging to make the two meet up as a dress. I misjudged the length I had to add in the middle and the dress turned out a little longer than I intended, I would have preferred tea length, but I think I can live with it as it is.

I followed the principle of ‘fitted at the top and freewheeling and loose lower down’, which is my usual approach to Lagenlook dresses. It did not turn out too bad at the first try, but I took in the sides a bit more from armscye to high hip to accentuate the bubble lower down. Otherwise the dress looks just straight up and down with a bit of rounding off at the hem. As it is, because of the printed fabric, the bubble construction gets rather lost, even after I topstitched all the bubble seams for emphasis. Maybe I should hand pick these style lines with a green embroidery cotton on top of the stitching, like a hand picked zipper. Not sure to be honest, I will need to marinate that idea for a while.

I added some volume to the skirt in parts to keep it in proportion with the upper part of the dress. As for the nitty-gritty of the sewing process, you can read all about it on Pattern Review.

Looking at the photos I think I could also have put in a dropped waist seam and joined the skirt to that. I have a bit of a tummy these days, so I don’t wear tight-waisted styles any more, but a dropped waist is more roomy and would look ok at high hip level. A bit of a flange would be a nice detail at that point. I might try this again in a plain linen with those changes. In the photo below there is a bit of a horizontal white patch at waist level, which almost looks like a seam there, which gave me the idea.

Marcy Tilton Bubble Dress

For a change, this was a very straight forward project, with almost no changes at all of the Vogue 9112 pattern.

The only alteration I made was to change the gathers at the hem ‘bubbles’ into little pleats. I alsmost always do this, as I dislike gathers and think pleats are nicer. But that is a very personal preference, or possibly, quirk.

You can read up on the sewing process here and see more photos of the finished dress below.

A Dress for Christmas

Isn’t it nice to have a lovely new dress for Christmas? I certainly think so. The only trouble is that this type of dress often only gets worn once or maybe twice and then joins the stack of special occasion outfits languishing in the back of my wardrobe. This is because it is usually too dressy for the office and not quite an evening outfit either. Not that I go out often in the evenings these days, and when I do it seldom requires too much dressing up.

So this year I decided to remake a previous Christmas dress into a new one, so the lovely silk dupioni it was made from would get another outing. Below is my inspiration piece from Amalthee:

Pretty, isn’t it?

My silk was green, not red, but equally suitable for Christmas and a colour closer to my taste, although I have started to quite like dark red of late. But the sleeves had to go. Trumpet sleeves look lovely but are totally impractical for someone who would be doing some last minute food handling and quite a bit of eating as well. Trumpet sleeves dunked into salad dressing and turkey gravy are not very appealing. Besides, in our Australian climate you are very likely to dissolve into a puddle of perspiration in long sleeves and silk ones at that. I considered elbow length, but even that is dicey on a hot day, and anyway, when I checked the leftover fabric at my disposal 3/4 sleeves ceased to be an option. In the end I decided on sleeveless with a shawl worn over the top.

The dress originally had cut on cap sleeves, which weren’t all that comfortable, a round neck and a voluminous swing shape with a hi-lo hemline. I believe the pattern had been a modified Tessuti Lily, which is my go-to pattern for A-line swing dresses. I had extended the shoulders for a sort of cap sleeve effect, not all that expertly I have to admit, and it looks to me as if I increased the width of the skirt at CF and CB too, by tilting the pattern pieces away from the fold, as illustrated in the picture below. (What is marked selvages could equally well be the fold of the fabric, if you did not want a centre seam. With the tilt of the pattern piece the width at the neck remains the same, but volume is added lower down without tacking it on at the sides.) More details about the sewing process can be found here.

But back to my green silk dress. I unpicked the side seams and recut the armscyes based on the Tessuti Eva dress, which I particularly like for a good fit in the shoulders and bust. I considered copying the interesting funnel shaped cowl of Vogue 9112 but in the end I left the round neck as it was, because I had a matching silver and green marble statement necklace I wanted to show off.

The back view of the hi-lo hem was a problem. Such a vast expanse of fabric! I had put a CB seam into the original dress, but even so, the dupioni did not drape much and that made it look enormous.

However, some time ago at a visit to the supermarket, I had seen someone wearing a hi-low tunic with ‘tails’, i.e. the back was split from the waist down. I really liked that look, so I decided to try it with this dress. I also took in some width at the back waist, about 10cm, to stop the CB seam from bulging outward unbecomingly at that point, and give a more fitted shape to the waist and the upper body. Not fitted, just ‘more fitted’. I am hopelessly spoiled by the loose clothing style I have become accustomed to.

Christmas lunch was lovely. A most enjoyable afternoon with our children, grandchildren, and some of our extended family, fun, laughter and good conversation. Even the weather was cooperative for a change, temp in the mid twenties, so not too hot, and sparkling sunshine. Just right to enjoy the view from DD’s back deck down to Chinamans Beach…

 

… and out through the headlands of glorious Sydney Harbour.

The Dance of the Brolgas

I love primitive art and somewhere on the internet I came across a shape resembling a brolga.

Brolgas are a northern Australain crane species and they dance in an exuberant fashion as part of their courting rituals.

(Photo courtesy of abc.net.au)

I also found this fabulous painting by Ros Jenke on her website.

Gosh, she is a terrific painter. She makes me wish I could paint, but that would be flogging a dead horse I fear. Better to stick with my version of art, which is dabbling in block printing right now.

I had a couple of meters of lilac voile left from my excursion into bunny rugs, and the brolga shape seemed quite the thing to turn some fabric and a bit of paint into a dress. I wanted short sleeves and an swing shape, so I merged my favourite 2 Tessuti dresses, the Eva for the bodice top and sleeves, and the Lily for the swing lower down. Below is a picture of the pattern pieces laid onto the fabric for cutting out, with the tilt away from the fold I so often talk about, without being quite sure whether anyone understands what I mean. The tilt adds volume at the CF and CB, getting wider towards the hem. I do this a lot, as I like volume, but not necessarily tacked on at the sides. It gives you a tad of extra room in the bust too and so could be used as a cheater FBA, although I don’t actually need it for that purpose. The photo below shows the back pieces being cut, which I do along the selvages, with a CB seam. The front would be cut on the fold, unless of course I want a CF seam as well.

If you are not too interested in the intricacies of block printing you might want to skip the next few paragraphs and go straight to the photos. My PR review with explanation of the sewing process is here.

Once I had cut out my fabric, I sewed up the CB seam I put in to save fabric, and also sewed up the shoulders. Then I laid it our flat (single layer) for printing., with the sleeve pieces not attached yet. I left the sleeve pieces loose for printing, but had the option of moving them roughly into place on my work surface to simulate where they will eventually go, so I could see how the motif placement would pan out.

The brolga stamp gave me a bit of a headache during the printing process. It is about the size of my hand and a bit unwieldy with the head, wings and feet sticking out everywhere. Not so much of a problem to plonk the stamp on the fabric, but the paint makes it stick and lift up the fabric on removal, and because of its size it is hard to take it off in one smooth action. It is then all to easy to get a bit of paint where you don’t want it.

This made me think that I needed to attach the carved rubber to a rigid backing. A bit of plywood would do the trick, except it doesn’t let me see where I place my motifs. So I picked up some Perspex offcuts at my local Perspex shop to try out with my next print run. I could also use some spray adhesive to stick the fabric to a piece of cardboard underneath. Depending on how it works with the Perspex I might do both.

I already mentioned that paint coverage can be a problem with block prints, and I had already tried sand papering the surface of the stamp to hold more ink, with no appreciable difference. So I thought that maybe using a brayer instead of a foam roller might give me a thicker layer of paint on my stamp. A brayer is a roller with  a rubber surface and the layer of paint sits on top instead of being absorbed by the foam with only minimal paint on the surface. This theory actually worked, there was more paint on the stamp with the brayer, but unfortunately it made the print itself looks a bit smudged and gluggy around the edges. So back to the drawing board. In the end I used a felt roller instead of either foam or rubber, which I think makes my prints looks best. I used the brayer to roll over the stamp to apply pressure to my print, which worked well also. Not sure if pressure with the brayer will still be necessary if I have a rigid backing on my stamp, but it might be.

So after a few gluggy prints at the back of my dress the rest of the printing went well. I confess here and now that the back of a garment concerns me much less than the front, which no doubt is a major failing on my part, but here you have it. So despite my trial prints on paper and scraps of fabric, when I get to the actual garment, I always start printing at the back hem so I can work out any problems before I get to places where they would be too obvious. Or heaven forbid bug me every time I look into the mirror.

Once the printing was done I let the dress and the sleeves dry in the open air and then put it in the dryer on high for another half hour to set the paint. With a thorough ironing once the dress is finished it should be good to wash. I am always a bit worried that I might gunk on a masterpiece before the paint has been set properly, meaning I can’t wash it without spoiling my prints and can’t set the prints without setting the stain as well.

But all went well and here is the result.

This has been linked back to RUMS.

The Pointy Dress

Every now and then you come across a pattern that is just perfect. For me perfection includes a heavy dose of quirkiness, or weirdness, depending on your point of view. But I assume that you are a kindred spirit if you are reading my blog. So let me introduce the Pointy Dress. I came across the original pattern in an Italian sewing magazine called La Mia Boutique. I loved a lot of their patterns, but since that one fabulous issue I bought their style direction has changed to a more mainstream aesthetic. I kept buying more issues when I could get my hands on them, but always ended up disappointed. Pity, but I bet they sell more magazines by catering to mainstream tastes. Anyway, here are the pics that captured my heart:

As it happened I had a striped interlock in my stash and so of course I traced out the pattern and made my own version. I reviewed the pattern here.

 

And below is the shape of the garment. You tuck in the pointy bits on the skirt, which makes a sort of little pocket, although I don’t think it is very usable as such, and provided your fabric is reasonably drapey the skirt will collapse into soft folds. You can also let the points stick out, but I prefer them tucked in.

However, the pattern was unnecessarily complicated. It had a two-part yoke with a seam at centre front and centre back, then three parts for the skirt, with diagonal seams going from the centre of the yoke to the sides. If you have a good look at the pic just above this one you can see a seam going from the bottom of the left scarf end to the left side seam. This makes it difficult to match stripes, and anyway, why not cut the back and front of the dress as single pieces? I do like simplicity.

I also didn’t like the dropped shoulders and the sleeves are unnecessarily wide at the top where they join the bodice. I always feel that if you have a lot of volume in a garment, as is the case with the skirt of this dress, the fit in the bust, shoulders and sleeves should be quite close to compensate.

So the next time I made this dress I used my TNT t-shirt pattern, Burda 3197, for the bodice part and sleeves, then frankenpatterned with the original La Mia Boutique pattern from below the bust downwards. I also joined up all the skirt pieces of the LMB pattern to make one pattern piece for the whole front. With this sort of garment it is not necessary to be too precise for the skirt part. 10cm more or less are neither here nor there. The back pattern piece is the same as the front, just with a higher neckline. I have also overlaid the dress pattern with the t-shirt pattern so you can see how it is frankenpatterned.

With the sleeves from the t-shirt the dress looks like this in grey ponte.

And like below you can see it in black ponte, with or without scarf. I wore this with a string of pearls to a family funeral recently and it impressed one of the rellies so much that she got all keen to take up sewing again. The more the merrier, I say.

 

If you like the style but do not want to draft your own pattern, the StyleArc Toni dress is something very similar. It has a CF and CB seam and a v-neck with collar, plus cut-on cap sleeves. The latter may suit you better than long sleeves if you live in the northern hemisphere where it is of course summer at the moment. You can also leave the collar off and just have a v-neck, or do whatever you like. We are sewists after all, we can please ourselves. 

You can see the pattern pieces of the Toni more clearly below.

  
 StyleArc have an Etsy store for downloads as well if you are not in Australia and don’t want to wait for the paper pattern to arrive in the mail. I am not affiliated, of course, just happy to point those interested in the right direction.
Me Made Mittwoch

The East is Red

Well, small exaggeration. I live on the east coast of Australia and I have made a red dress, but that is as far as it goes.

For years I have avoided red, and I still don’t like the bright Chinese style red, but I am coming around to appreciating the darker, bluer red like crimson or cherry. So I bought a remnant of cherry red ponte and if the fabric has been bought it has to be made into something. At least that is the goal. Heaven knows my stash is proof that it doesn’t always work that way. But this time I not only had the fabric, but I had bought some new patterns and wonder of wonders! I felt like trying a new pattern. This does not happen often, I have to say, I have a distinct leaning towards the TNTs. Just because a pattern has been made a dozen times does not mean that it can’t be made again. It’s just warming up nicely.

But I had bought Vogue 9107and 9112 and made up neither, and the cherry red ponte seemed quite a good match for 9107. Not the colour blocked or mixed print version, I am truly hopeless at getting those right, but just a plain version of the dress. I was thinking to add a cowl, but when I found a nice matching silk velvet scarf in my wardrobe I dropped the idea. At least for now, I can always add it later if I feel I need the warmth.

The pattern is easy to make up, provided you are careful with marking the edge of the skirt piece that adjoins the bodice, as the shape is quite weird and it is not at all intuitive which side is up. But apart from that it is pretty plain sailing. I decided early on that I didn’t want the 2 piece sleeves, and swapped them out with the sleeves from my TNT tee. That necessitated changing the armscyes to match, which is where it got a little more complicated because one of the armscyes goes across both the bodice and the skirt. But I laid out both pieces how they would go together, then overlaid the tee pattern and traced around it. Easy-peasy.

The dress turned out fine, but I don’t think it will be a favourite. That is the problem when your sewing mostly goes well, your expectations ratchet up, you get ever more picky and it is harder to be satisfied with the result. There is nothing wrong technically with this dress, nor with the style, it just doesn’t grab me. Maybe I don’t like red that much after all. But at least the wildlife seemed to like it, this bush Turkey had a good old sticky beak to see what was going on when I was taking the photos. Or maybe he was checking to see when I would be planting some more vegetables.

Below are low are a few pics styled in various ways, with a scarf or a cardi or both, and with my Marcy Tilton wide legged pants or skinny pants. The dress is a little too short in places for me to wear on its own. I don’t do minis.

And I am still having trouble with the sunlight being bright behind me on the lawn, making the foreground underexposed and I have to lighten it up in Photoshop. The lack of light makes some of the pics a bit grainy and the colours sometimes a bit over the top. In the pics where this does not happen because it is not sunny, the red of the dress is too yellow-y, exactly the sort of red I don’t like much. But you get the idea. Think cherry red.

I have never worn the pendant in the picture below, I feel it is a bit over the top and so far I haven’t been brave enough. Maybe one day…

The Willara Dress

First of all I want to apologise for making people give their names and email addresses when they want to leave a comment. It was the default when I set up the blog, and I should have found the setting I needed to change earlier and turned that off. I have absolutely no interest in harvesting email addresses and this blog is in no way a commercial venture, I just want to share my knowledge and contribute to the sewing community.

The Willara dress is by an indie pattern designer who lives in my local area, at least from the perspective of the many overseas readers of this blog. Her name is Pearl Red Moon, she does Lagenlook and her brand is called Boho Banjo. I am not in any way affiliated, but I think any one making Lagenlook patterns available to us aficionados deserves a bit of help and encouragement. This is her site, Boho Banjo Art to Wear

And this is the  Willara pattern.

  
  
The Willara dress is a fabulous pattern, but before I go any further I need to warn everyone that as usual, I have adulterated it to suit my own purposes. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because we are in the depths of winter here and the pattern is designed for summer, or at least for substantially warmer weather than this. Or for someone who doesn’t feel the cold, which is decidedly not me. Growing up in the cold climate of Central Europe has traumatised me to the degree that keeping warm is all I care about as soon as the temps drop below 20 Centigrade.

So, despite the lovely wide boat neck being a very attractive feature and a point of difference to other tunic patterns, all it means to me at present is a cold neck. This will change when the hot weather arrives, but for this winter version I had to do a cowl. I just couldn’t help myself.

I also used a ponte, which is possibly a bit stiffer and bulkier than you would want for the design, although I am very happy with the result. I am thinking of a nice silk charmeuse I have in my stash for another version down the track, but a knit or soft cotton or linen would work as well.

The pattern is very economical with fabric, and even economical to print. 40 sheets of paper are not a lot for a dress. I re-use misprints from work and print on the back to save the trees. You can save even more paper by not printing the straight rectangular lower pattern piece of the dress. I just measured the width of the bottom edge of the upper part, which was around 108cm front and back, and then cut two rectangles with that length and 37cm wide. I am 161cm  or 5’4″ tall, and the length is good.

But BEFORE you print, be aware that you need to set your printer to landscape. Despite this being in the instructions and obvious from the picture, I managed to ignore it and ended up with everything printed sideways. Not good. Also, on my printer, the extra paper that is usually around the edge of each pattern page, and needs to be partially removed when the pattern is assembled, is only on two sides, not all around. I’m not sure if this is something I have done or the way the pattern is set up, but I LOVE, LOVE LOVE that! Normally there is a frame of a couple of centimetres around each page, some of which needs to be cut off before you can match each page to the next. But with this pattern, having the excess only on two sides means that the pages are able to be assembled without having to cut off any of that excess, you just overlap the paper like the scales of a fish. 

  
How good is that?

  

Once the pattern is  taped together, the cutting takes no time at all. I use a rotary cutter and two large cutting mats, and I have to say that this has made a huge difference. I used to hate cutting out and fantasise about someone doing it for me, maybe the good fairy, but since I stopped grovelling on the floor with pins and scissors it so no longer an issue. I have my cutting mats permanently on a table, which could be a dining table with a cloth over the top, and when I need to cut out I just lay everything out, put a few weights on the pattern pieces (pebbles) and it is done in no time. My back is very happy.
Sewing the Willara was uneventful, everything goes together very nicely. The only tricky bits are the ‘points’ at the sides and I am sure there is something about how to do them in the instructions. I didn’t really use them, although I had a quick look and they seemed very comprehensive. I used my overlocker/serger for most of the seams, and my coverstitch for the hems, so the whole dress was finished in a couple of hours. I did have to do some topstitching as the ponte has a fair bit of man-made fibre in it and wouldn’t iron down nicely. Using better behaved fabric where the seams iron flat nicely, so you don’t need to topstitch, will make sewing even faster.

The sizing is generous. I am around 72kg, with a bust of 101cm, not slim, but according to the size table I made the smallest size. It fits just fine. The sleeves are reasonably wide at the top too, so I don’t think those with a prominent biceps will need any alterations, but better check. I lengthened the sleeves to full length (did I mention that it is cold?). I will be using both the short and 3/4 length in future versions.

   
    
   
So thanks, Pear Red Moon for this lovely pattern. I think it will be another TNT for me.