Expressing my love for the African wax print

Today I have a very colourful dress to show you.  This is my fourth African wax print dress and each time I wear the others I swear that I'm going another as they make me so happy.  I feel like they fit my style well as they are colourful without being novelty and I also love the great interactions I get with other people when I wear them.  People come up to me on the street or the hospital that I work in and talk to me about the prints which is awesome as Londoners tend not to do that often.

 

I used the Sew Over It Ultimate shift dress pattern.  I've made this pattern so many times but I'd never made the frilled shoulders before as I'm not a massive frill fan but I don't know what got into me and I just went for it and I'm really pleased as these frills I love. 

 

Despite making this pattern a lot of times, each time I do, I think that I need to lengthen it.  I think I forgot because several of them are winter versions that I wear with tights.  However, this is definitely a summer version and it feels like it should be a smidge longer.  However its been doing me well in this heat wave we've been having. 

And just because if there's ever a giant pink flamingo around you, you should definitely give it a cuddle, particularly if you're wearing a dress to match!

 

All the sparkliness

This dress was a combo of random events! In a post-assignment high I started searching sparkly fabrics to reward myself.  Some people buy jewellery or shoes, I bought fabric!  Specifically gold sparkly, sequin fabric from Guthrie and Ghani, its out of stock but they still have silver.  To be honest I wanted the midnight blue sparkles but they were sold out and in my post assignment frenzy I needed something.  I may need to go away and thing about any addiction like symptoms I'm showing here but maybe after I go dance in sequins at our Christmas party!

I knew I needed a simple pattern without many stitching lines, to avoid the number of points I would be feeding sequins through my sewing machine.  I settled on the Ultimate shift dress pattern from Sew Over It.  

Making up the dress was actually relatively simple.  I was prepared for my machine to baulk at sewing through the sequins but it really didn't.  However as soon as you touch this fabric, to either cut or sew it, it sheds sequins EVERYWHERE!  My flatmate and I are now resigned to finding them everywhere for the rest of our lives!  I lined the dress in black peachskin which I've had in my stash for a few years, hopefully this will prevent the sequins jabbing me too much.

This is actually the first time that I've managed to make a Christmas dress, usually things get too crazy and I run out of time but this year is a win!  Time to go dancing and sing loudly to Christmas songs!

One UFO down

It's UFO (unfinished object) month over on the monthly stitch where I am an irregular contributor,and it was a good excuse to challenge myself to return to some of the UFOs that I had knocking around my sewing room.  

The items that mainly end up as my UFOs tend to be things that I think for one reason or another are not going to work out.  The first one of these that I decided to tackle was a Sew Over It, Ultimate shift dress that I had cut out in October/November last year (at the same time as my top version) and had just never sewn together.  This was partly because, while I love the print, the top has some fit issues which means that it's not that comfortable to wear and I had a sneaking suspicion was sure that a shift dress with no waist shaping would not work for my shape. However in my gung-ho way I had cut it out of a fabulous silk crepe that I was determined I should not waste, so it was time to get to work.

Ta da! From UFO to FO!

I figured that some of the restriction I experience in the arms/upper back with my Ultimate top might be helped if I used a 1cm seam allowance instead of 1.5cm.  This worked well but I was still left with a sack effect round the middle.  Gillian's made a few lovely shift dresses where she's used her Alma pattern to create some darts for the back. I didn't have the alma pattern so I returned to my sixties shift dress (which I must return to, the darts may be more work but realistically create a better shift shape for someone with my proportions) and pinched the back darts from it.  I considered adding some darts to the front but decided that since I'm unlikely to wear the dress without a belt and adding them had the potential to go wrong and spoil the line of my dress, I wouldn't bother.

I got the silk crepe from fabricsforsale. I'd ordered 2m for some other purpose but they didn't have enough to complete my order, so I took the 1.3m they had left as it sounded lovely and put it aside for 'some other purpose'. Turns out this was it.  The ultimate dress is really thrifty on the fabric front, I got a dress with 3/4  length sleeves out of 1.3m. I did cut the facings out of a different fabric but I'm not sure now if I did that because I ran out of fabric or if I just fancied the idea of Liberty insides! I finished the back with a ribbon loop and a lovely ceramic button that I found in the Ulster Museum shop, last time I was back in Belfast.

Im now pleased with this finished dress and it will be perfect to wear to several of the 30th birthday/weddings/hen dos (yes I've hit that life stage) I have to attend in the next few months and the silk crepe feels wonderful to wear.  However, I think the top of the dress is still on the blousier side than I would like.  Clearly some more fit work has to happen before I make another version of this dress.

While the idea of a simple to sew, simple to throw on dress appeals to my lazy side I think I may have to accept that in order to pull off the shift dress, I need darts and shaping and to sew a little bit more than the few seams in this dress.  How about you, how do you make shift dresses work for your shape?

Totally Sew Over It

So today I have a sew over it double act to show you. I loved my first pair of ultimate trousers (although they were too big and met a sad failed refashioning fate) and have wanted another pair. Also last pay day I treated myself to their ultimate shift dress pattern and figured they would make a good combo. 

The are made from black twill which I bought from Minerva crafts at the same time as the fabric for my previous pair. I had planned to make a skirt with it so I only had a metre which created some interesting sewing challenges. 

With only a metre I knew these were going to be cropped (maybe not the most practical as temperatures drop in the UK but never mind). These had been cut and I'd started sewing when I spotted a colleague wearing a pair of trousers with zips at the ankles and I knew I wanted to add them to my ultimate trousers. I followed this post from Megan Nielsen on inserting exposed zippers and I'm really proud of them. I'd never used them before and while they're far from perfect I can now see how the process works and improved from one to the next. So now bring on all the exposed zippers! I cut a size 12 with the other adjustments I had done in the class. The only thing I don't like about these trousers is that the fabric stretches out with each wear which is annoying. However, I'm going to make another pair in wool for winter. 

I cut out the ultimate shift top in cutting spree I had a couple of weeks ago. It's a liberty print fabric that I had left over from a sew over it tea dress that I made a one of their classes about 4 years ago. It seemed like fate for it to become another sew over it pattern. I needed to make quite a lot of alterations to the top which as I didn't make a muslin were a bit convoluted in the fashion fabric. I cut a size 12 (grading to 14 at hips) however, there were lots of fitting issues and I wanted it to be less loose at the waist. The upper arms needed more room plus I needed more room across the back, I will need to do a broad back adjustment in future but this time I dealt with it by sewing the top with 1 cm seam allowances. 

We took these photos in our super beautiful local park.  I always read about how other bloggers boyfriends/children/husbands/pets take such wonderful pictures without a single word of complaint.  My boyfriend rations me to the number of photos he will take of me in the cold.  When I told him I was going to out this lack of generosity to the blogosphere, he told me that I should as he should really be featuring more prominently on the blog, so to make him happy, here's a photo of him, not wearing handmade clothes.  

Isn't he cute?  (I need to keep him sweet because when looking at these photos, I realised that my next mission should be to get him down on the ground to take photos of me.  He is tall and his photo taking angle is not working for me.) 

As Sew Over it have such lovely sewing cafes I thought it was appropriate to include a photo of me curled up with a cup of tea.

Happy weekend all.