turquoise halterneck-dress

I’m making August the month of dresses with this post – third in a row! (That I made this some summers ago doesn’t matter, does it?)

This was the first dress I made my dear friend Stine, the second being this one. I had promised her a dress for her birthday, and with a school trip to China coming up, it made sense to get my hands on some slinky silk while there – it being the country of silk and all! Picking a color was easy – I had a recent picture of her in mind, wearing a turquoise jacket that worked with her fair complexion perfectly.

Back from the trip to China, I draped most of this dress straight on a dress-form, with Stine’s measurements close by to double-check. I’m pretty sure this was my first attempt at draping, so there were a couple of bumps along the way! I was fortunately able to try the dress on Stine before finishing it completely, and it did need a little adjusting here and there – mostly in the bust-area, where the gathering was a little bulky. I ended up hand-sewing all the hems on the dress, mostly because the silk was hard to control while machine-sewing, but also I just like doing things by hand.

Yes, it’s really low cut in the back. But she’s a dancer! And the best part? She’s worn the dress lots.

green dress (aka going-to-a-wedding dress)

I started this dress a long while back – over a year ago, I believe. It’s been through several transformations in that time! It started when I went fabric-shopping with a friend in the spring last year, and bought some yards of this smooth cotton-blend in a lovely dirtied green, but with no plans for it. A couple of days later, I saw a dress in a magazine, and decided to copy it. The dress in the magazine was made out of an entirely different type of fabric, and I had no patterns even remotely similar that I could use as a starting point. I set to it regardless, with a great amount of enthusiasm… for about three days. With nothing even close to a finished dress, and a lot of frustration over my malfunctioning self-drafted pattern, I put it away for almost a year.

It did turn out to be a dress in the end, and I’m quite pleased with it. This is it’s 4th incarnation.

When I was invited to the wedding of a dear friend and her girlfriend, I immediately thought of my unfinished green dress, and made up my mind to finish it and wear it to the wedding. Because of the sub-par pattern I had made for the bodice, it ended up too wide, and since I had already cut into the fabric (of which there was nothing left by the time all the pieces were cut out – the skirt was two rectangles with the width and length completely determined by what was left when all else had been accounted for), I had to find a way to alter the bodice to fit. I ended up with adding a box-pleat centered on the back piece, and a couple of pleats at the shoulder seam on the front.

At this point I had already sewn in the sleeves, and should only have to add the skirt and be done. Unfortunately, basting the pleated skirt on, the dress was looking pretty frumpy and unflattering, with way too much volume in too many places. I credit the success (or completion – actually, I will credit them both) to my dear boy, who pointed out that a more defined waist would balance out all the volume going on. Going through my stash, I found a leafy-floral print in a lighter green that matched my dress perfectly, and whipped up a fitted, shaped waistband, gathering excess fabric from the front torso under the bust. It was an instant huge improvement, and I even like the poufiness that occurred in the back from the too-long torso. From the side, it reminds me of certain 40’s silhouettes I’ve seen in illustrations and on vintage sewing patterns:

I snuck off for a couple of minutes during the day of festivities and took some snapshots of myself all dressed up.

Some frump remained, however, and after some tucking of the sleeves, hemming and hawing, and more advice from the boy, I took the seam-ripper to the sleeves, and got rid of them. Phew! I felt quite some relief at the decision to take them off, but even more when I saw that I liked the dress much better sleeveless. I added some finishing touches on the inside to cover up all raw edges (lots of handsewing), and it was all ready for the wedding ahead!

Hey boy? You make a really good partner in crime. This dress looks nice because of you.

hello again grey dress

Remember the grey and green dress (that also was my very first post here on this blog)?

The walls only looks slightly pink because it was very dark when I took the picture. Lots of photo-editing = bad.

Yeah, it’s not grey and green anymore. I mentioned a couple of things that were a bit wonky with the dress already back then, like me having chosen the wrong size for the yoke (too small), and that I should have used interfacing. The dress didn’t exactly look bad, but there were some things that just weren’t quite right. Since the yoke wasn’t very stiff, and it was a size or two too small, it sagged and pulled to the side, making a not-so-flattering gap where the upper edge fell away from my body. Hmm. Also, the sleeves were quite tight, which made the dress just a tad unpractical to wear. Lastly, and I guess, most importantly – I could never get that green color to work with anything. I do love that color, but being so bright, and in pretty stark contrast to the grey, I found it hard to pair it with pretty much anything else in my wardrobe.

Off to market, ehm, the cobbler to pick up my shoes. The ones on my feet are from Sally-Jane Vintage.

So, here is an “after” of sorts. I replaced the green fabric with a brown/blue floral patterned fabric – it’s giving me a bit of a House on the Prairie-vibe! It blends more with the grey fabric, which I think is a good thing – it will be much easier to wear with all my other clothes now!

baby-blanket

There is a baby on it’s way in the immediate family, and of course I needed to make that baby something. I’ve been collecting and holding on to random scraps of fabric lately, thinking that *someday*, surely I will be able to use it for some cool project – which turned out to be this one! (ok, here is a confession: It’s not lately that I’ve been holding on to scraps, it’s always. I’ve just started anew since moving to Chicago).

Re-purposing things gives me such a thrill, rivaled only by the glee of getting use out of every little piece of something, like scraps of fabric (or lengths of yarn, or every drop of shampoo, or leftover food. Yes, I am very thrifty. And it makes me very happy.) And for this baby-blanket I certainly got to do that!

Surprisingly few scraps were harmed used for this project.

I think perhaps this is the quilt where I got the idea of doing long strips of scraps for a blanket, and I am quite certain that a couple of her other quilts have been both a direct and an unconscious inspiration. I’m really drawn to this woman’s mix of traditional methods with a modern and graphic look. At any rate, I gathered all my fabric scraps first, picked out the ones I though went well together, and started cutting them into 3 inch wide strips, that I then cut to random lengths. I then sewed the pieces together in a fairly random order, until the strips were long enough. The teal-colored heavy jersey for the background was in an oddly shaped piece, but I managed to get six rectangles out of it – two for the shorter sides, and four to go next to the scrap-strips. Next came sewing all the strips and long rectangles of jersey together. In my enthusiasm for starting the blanket, I wasn’t terribly accurate in cutting the pieces of fabrics with straight lines and 90 degree angles. It would have been a little easier to sew it all together if everything matched up, but it worked out alright anyways.

After the top layer was all done, I added three layers of a rib jersey to make the blanket nice and soft. I decided to use that instead of the traditional quilt batting, since the loose batting might shift during machine washing, which I thought would be important for a baby blanket. (I’ve never used quilt batting, so I might be wrong about this one!) Also, I had lots of that jersey on hand, which meant I had everything I needed to make the blanket right away. To hold the layers together, the boy and I (he’s the co-designer of the blanket) settled on a sort of sun-burst looking pattern – something that would be linear, like the strips of scraps,  without being neither horizontal nor vertical. For the binding I ended up making bias tape out of a cotton I’d also used for some of the scraps. It’s nice when things actually match sometimes! The bias tape was surprisingly nice and easy to make, but wow – it took a really long time to hand-sew it on.

Sewing at sunset by a lake in northern Maine. It was lovely.

And finally, as a little finishing touch, I embroidered a little message on the back:

internet loveliness

My, I feel lucky! I just returned from a lovely week in Maine, to find not one, but two packages waiting for me! The first was from Elise, who had a giveaway recently when she launched her website. I was lucky enough to win the hand-bound journal, and this was inside my package:

Be still my heart! So pretty! I love the print, and I love the look of hand-bound books, so this was a good deal all around. Elise is very talented, and I’ve been a fan and a follower of her blog for a good while now. I especially like her approach to scrapbooking – use what you have, make it messy if you want, and just create.

Opening the book was just as exiting as opening the package! I got a balloon-postcard as well, and her business-card, which I think is just so well designed. She wrote about the different ones she has had here, including a picture of the backside. Just as pretty as the front, which is a feat in itself. And – notice the teal-colored stamp? It says “This book belongs to”. What a nice little touch!

My other package was tiny – a free sampler of business cards from MOO. Yep, ten free business-cards, that you can design just as you want! I thought it was a good deal, despite the little black banner they stick on the bottom. I might be cheating them out of some advertisement by trimming it off with an x-acto knife, but I won’t hesitate to do some word of mouth for them. I chose the “green” paper option, recycled and chlorine free, and I think they are just lovely.

Recognize the images? One is from the header, and the other is me being cheeky while wearing my dress pants. The pictures are a little pixelated, which is all my fault for using images that were a little too small (MOO told me they might turn out pixelated). Every step, from designing the cards, to the email updates and the package I got, was easy and full of niceness. So, I like MOO.