Yellow and grey Hemingway dress

This dress is made with a gorgeous quality Hemingway design fabric from a trip to Brighton three years ago, and I love the print.  It's another Ruby bodice / different skirt mash up - I used the skirt from a vintage pattern which I picked up in the pattern swap at #sewbrum a couple of years ago.

I had to fiddle about with the pleats a bit to get the two waistlines to match up (the skirt being bigger than the bodice), but pleats are really quite forgiving of a bit of adjustment here and there and other than that this was a straightforward make.

Shown here with a petticoat - this dress is one I'll probably wear in the winter with a wool cardigan and boots (and the petticoat for extra insulation).

Mortmain dress

This dress was a serious disappointment, largely because it didn't fit.  I love this fabric - it's the fourth dress I've made from this print (the others are here and here) and the colour is just gorgeous. Going by the measurements on the pattern envelope I cut a size 10, and really I should have taken notice of the fact that the instructions say it is close-fitting.

Whilst I didn't find it uncomfortable it could do with a bit more ease (or me being a bit slimmer); the bust darts are also too high, although it doesn't notice with the allover print and it doesn't adversely affect the line of the dress.  The worst problem though was that the armholes are too high cut at the front.  So... having completely finished this apart from sewing down the bodice lining, I tried it on and discovered all these fit issues.  I unpicked the bodice side seams and armholes, created alternative bodice front and back pattern pieces (basically by looking at myself in the mirror wearing this dress and memorising where and how much fabric to remove around the armholes), and recut and resewed the bodice.  This was fiddly and didn't really make much of an improvement so I've decided to get rid of the bodice and turn this into a skirt - I've got enough fabric left to make a waistband, I just need to buy a skirt zip.

As I said at the beginning - a disappointment.

Betty dress

Another stash busting dress, this is a sew over it Betty made with rose print fabric in a lovely apricot colour which these photos don't really do justice to, it looks great with navy blue and sea green.  Here it is on its own

And here with a petticoat.

This was an easy make (although I lined the bodice rather than use the facings which came with the pattern) and I'll probably make another one sometime next year.

St Ives dress

I made this from three remnants which I bought a while ago (I seem to be saying that a lot recently!) from, I think, Fabrics Galore at either an Olympia or Ally Pally show.  It's furnishing fabric and each piece was 1m long, and cut halfway down the vertical length of the bolt, so I was a bit limited as to pattern choice, but figured I could work something out.  And this is it!

A Butterick 5748 bodice and the straight skirt from New Look 6824.  I had a bit of fiddling around to do to get the pleats in the front of the skirt and darts in the back to match up with the bodice darts, and also to make the skirt the same width as the bodice at the waist seam, but it all worked out in the end.

I hemmed it by hand - with thinner fabrics I usually machine sew hems, but I thought this fabric would be too bulky for a machined hem, and it's thicker than the pink polka dot fabric of the previous dress.  Even though it's a straight skirt, I seem to remember it still took quite a while to do, but hand hemming was definitely the right choice.  I love this dress, just a bit miffed that we had such a grotty summer this year and I didn't wear it much.  Here's hoping for better weather next year!

Pink polka dot Ruby dress

This dress has the bodice from the Ruby dress pattern by Simple Sew, which was a freebie from Love Sewing magazine.  However, the circle skirt in this pattern is too short for my taste, so I used a skirt from New Look 6886, which is cut on the cross.  It's made from a 2m furnishing fabric remnant, so the skirt holds its shape quite well.


I traced the bodice pattern and increased the seam allowance to 5/8" (it only had a 3/8" allowance) because I thought it would make for easier matching up with the skirt if both parts of the dress had the same seam allowance.

Why don't all patterns have 5/8" seam allowances?  It would make mixing and matching patterns much less time consuming!  Also, I'm sure that one of these days I'll make up a pattern which only has 3/8" allowances and forget that fact and sew it up with 5/8" seams...

Purple bricks dress

I bought this fabric in John Lewis a couple of years ago and it's lovely quality - I really don't know why it took me so long to sew it up!  This is a Simplicity 2444 and I lined the bodice rather than use the facings that come with the pattern. 

Not really anything else to say about it!

OAL 2017 - Robin's Egg Vandyke cardigan

So, having written about the two dresses I made for this challenge, I thought I'd jump the post queue with this cardigan, to keep the three OAL items together.  (In addition to the two OAL dresses I've already written about, I made six dresses during the time it took me to finish knitting this - I sew more quickly than I knit!)

I knew I wanted to use this wool (Madelinetosh sock in Robin's Egg) and so the fabric choices for the dresses came after I'd decided on the wool.  I also knew the shape of cardigan I wanted to knit (fitted, v-neck and waist-length), but spent some time scouring my stitch dictionaries and knitting some tension squares to see how the potential lace patterns knitted up with this particular wool.

I settled on using this stitch pattern (which is the top pattern in the swatch above) from the lace and eyelet stitches Harmony Guide.

As I was knitting, the first and third skeins I used bled colour a bit onto my hands and needles (although the second skein didn't...), so I was very pleased to find that the birds on dress number 2 were a great colour match.

Buttons were in my stash, but originally from Textile Garden

I've worn this cardigan a few times since I made it (thanks grotty English summer weather which necessitated wool cardigan wearing) and the colour didn't come off onto my (bare) arms - or the dress underneath it - but I haven't chanced wearing it with the Homemaker dress.  I still love it though, and I have plenty of other clothes I can wear it with.

Then, as a lovely surprise at the end of the OAL, a benevolent random number generator chose me as one of this year's winners!  And Lauren said some very lovely things about my cardigan on her blog - cue warm glow inside :-)  It took me a little while to choose the patterns which were the prize (two knitting patterns from Andi Satterlund, and two sewing patterns from indiestitches but I settled on Blaster and Mary Mead for the knitting patterns, and Stockholm and Emery for the sewing.

I'm not sure when I'll get around to knitting up either of Andi's patterns, I have a list as long as your arm of vintage patterns I want to knit (in addition to the ideas in my head and knitting for the family), and also I prefer to use 4-ply or thinner wool.  But I like the style of them so I might get around to them eventually.  The Emery is to replace the one I've got which has got a bit frayed around the edges from use, and the Stockholm jacket pattern is from a new-to-me company and I liked the shape of both jackets.

Hummingbird dress

So, hot on the heels of the Homemaker dress, I made this one.  Again, I used fabric which I've had for a while and which I thought would go well with the cardigan I'd decided to make.

This dress is a mash-up of the bodice from Simplicity 2444 which I modified to have a lower neckline at both the front and the back, and which I lined rather than faced, and the skirt is Christine Haynes Emery. 

 
I've used both these patterns before and since the skirt is gathered there was no lining up to do at the waistline and this was a quick make.  Another addition to my growing collection of bird print dresses!

The Happy Homemaker dress

Well, this blog has been very neglected over the summer and I have rather a lot of catching up to do!


I bought the fabric for this dress a couple of years ago (from here) after having seen it in my Instagram feed and I like it so much that I used it as the background for my header photo when I gave this blog a bit of a revamp earlier this year!  I love its retro vibe and I guess the design was inspired by the Enid Seeney Homemaker tableware design for Ridgway pottery which was originally sold in Woolworths - the teapots fetch silly prices on ebay.  I wonder which of today's teapots will fetch silly prices in 50 years' time? 

Anyway, on to the dress which I made back in June and which was intended to be for the #OAL2017 challenge run by Lauren and Andi.  They have run this outfit-along for the past four years - the first year I just watched from the sidelines, the second year I got my act together, last year I didn't, and this year I did - although once again I didn't use either the knitting or sewing patterns which were suggested.

For the dress I used Simplicity 4984, a vintage pattern from the early 1960s, and I made view 2.

It came together pretty quickly and easily - I moved the zip from the side to the back and I also lined the bodice.

I say this dress was intended to be the sewn contribution to my outfit, however... when I started knitting the cardigan (which I have yet to blog about) the wool bled colour onto my hands as I knitted - not much, but enough for me to think that I didn't want to risk wearing it with a white dress.  So I made another dress, which will be for another blog post.

With petticoat

I'm really pleased with this dress and will probably wear it into the winter too.  It's mid-calf length, which is longer than most of the dresses I've made, and I think with a petticoat underneath as an extra layer and boots it'll look just fine.