Vogue 1353 Kay Unger dress, with cheery red flowers

So what do you do when you've just made a really big mess of your silk chiffon. Sew with woven cotton of course!

In order to restore my shaken sewing self esteem, I made a very simple dress, from a purse soothing fabric I bought for $4 a metre in a Spotlight quilting fabric sale some years ago.

 I think that I may have originally intended that this fabric be for an apron, but I needed cheering up, so red flowers were just the thing for a bit of mood lightening. The lining of the bodice is a lovely cotton repurposed from a Sheraton cotton pillow case that no longer has matching sheets. Naturally, with so little financial input and no sentiment at stake, this project went perfectly.

I carefully read Beth from Sunnygal Studio's detailed post about her construction of this dress, and benefited greatly from her FBA technique, which I slavishly copied (eliminate the dart in the princess seam, lengthen the centre piece of the bodice by the width of the dart), as this is much more speedy than my usual method of cut, pivot and slide. Thanks Beth! I agree with Beth that you really need a non fusible interfacing for the neckline pleats, and I used cotton organdie, wanting to keep the dress as cool to wear as possible.
(I note that although Beth was not overly impressed with her first version of the dress, she later made another one)

Despite this FBA alteration, and a small square shoulder adjustment, I found the armscyes a little tight. My other, normal for Vogue, alterations were to narrow the waist and to narrow the centre back, otherwise this fit rather nicely if I do say so myself. I do love a nice full skirt, it saves so much work on alterations :). Unfortunately, the pleats in the skirt did not meet the darts or seam lines in the bodice in the size I made without considerable tweaking, but in a print, this is not terribly noticeable, just a drafting hiccup that is unfortunately common in big 4 patterns. You may be able to see that I was not terribly dedicated with my tweaking.....
My other construction alteration was to use the outer pattern pieces for the lining, gathering instead of pleating the neckline.

My reason for doing this was pure laziness. I did not want to make another FBA on the darted lining front, particularly as would have to use a different alteration method, which would put me at risk of enlarging the lining a different amount to the outer bodice. I was not keen for this possibility of giving myself an interesting engineering problem.

I emphasised the pleasing neckline with minipiping, and also used this on the armscyes, after trimming off a little seam allowance.

Outcome: A very useful, cheery dress for late summer into autumn, perfect for our warm climate and very good for the sewing mojo.
In fact I liked this pattern so much that I straight away made another dress from it. I'll post about that another time.

Lace shorts, Burda Style 03-2011-131

Lace shorts have been ubiquitous here.


I've been meaning to make some for my daughter for a year or two now. I even bought some nice sturdy cotton lace yardage about 12 months ago (Pittwater trading), and although I have only the slightest tendency towards keeping up with current fashion, my daughters are much more interested in being in style. I  thought I'd better get around to making this type of garment before the fad disappeared completely from the shops.

The problem was, that I didn't really know how to manage the hems, lining and waistband, so easier projects kept rising to the front of the queue.

I looked at some ready to wear lace shorts.

The RTW available for my viewing were uniformly tacky, poorly made, mostly polyester - and pricey. $80-100 for shorts with raw seams visible through the lace!. This gave me some confidence. Mine could not possibly be worse.


I decided to try underlining with faux Hong Kong seams, as per Laura Lo's tutorial, a method that I had used with some success in a skirt a few years ago. The underlining fabric is a very pale pink imperial batiste.
Underlining shorts though, is not the same as underlining a skirt. That dratted crotch curve! There was a lot of fiddling before the seam width at the centre seam was even throughout the curve and not too obvious through the lace. I must have unpicked it at least five times, and that was before I started working on the zip.....


The pattern, naturally, was one I had tried earlier, an experiment with this project in mind, as usually, shorts in our house require a lot of fitting. This pattern is a very simple style with few pattern pieces, in order to avoid interrupting the lace. Burda Style 03-2011-131 seen previously in cotton twill.


I used a thick elastic, marketed as "elastic waistband" which solved all my waistband concerns other than the actual finishing technique- there's some RTW worthy overlocking there :) Originally, I used an exposed metal zip, but neither my daughter nor I liked the appearance of this, and the shorts were a little loose at the back, so I was able to unpick it and subsitute a lapped zip instead, with a little help from some black bias tape on the underlap edge. The waistband is closed with two buttons and an elastic loop. Fortunately black hair elastics are more readily available than black elastic loop tape
.
The lace fabric had a wide strip of cotton selvage on the edge. I cut out the shorts using this edge as the hem, and trimmed away all the woven selvage before overstitching the lace edge with a very fine zig-zag. This has proven quite a robust hem finish and has even survived being put through the washing machine by mistake. The batiste underlayer is hemmed with a machine embroidery stitch, so there is a pretty finish visible through the lace  -however, in real life, this is one of those sewing secrets visible only to the wearer !
My daughter loves these shorts. I actually finished them a few months ago. Being mostly cotton, they are cool and comfortable to wear, and in fact they have been worn everywhere, from the beach to parties, and I consider them one of my most successful projects despite my initial trepidation about working with lace in a utilitarian garment. Sometimes its good to work outside my comfort zone.