Wedding Guest Dress

I had the honour of attending the lovely wedding of Liz a few weeks ago, and as I am a fan neither of pink concoctions nor their prices, decided to create B's frock myself. (I am a fan of party frocks!)



This is based on the Itty Bitty Baby Dress (free pattern!) from Made By Rae, somewhat enlarged and with different straps. All of the dress materials came from our lovely local shop Darn It & Stitch, including these fantastic vintage glass buttons.



The shoes were one pattern combined with another pattern's idea. I used the Pleated Ballerina Shoe [pdf] pattern from Homespun Threads but added lacing loops like the ones at Me Sew Crazy, resulting in something that looks a bit like a highland dancing shoe!



Little minx unlaced them. :D

I think I must like these colours. Before B was born I knit a 1-year size baby cardigan. Here it is, it still needs a zip though!



It's a basic round yoke cardigan, knit in Lana Grossa Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch and some other random red sock yarn. No real pattern, just made it up to suit the measurements. :)

Baby Trousers

These are fun to make, and pretty darn quick once you know what you're doing. Excellent for covering those cloth-nappied bubble bums.


Big Butt Baby Pants, pattern from Made by Rae

Pair 1, in some insane striped jersey. (The pattern is written for wovens, but seemed to worked fine with this cotton jersey.)



Pair 2, made from a pair of old shirt-sleeves plus a bum panel of fun fabric. :)



The pattern goes way into the toddler sizes, so I'm certain to be making more of these!

Maternity Wrap Top

I made this top ages ago. It's a knockoff of an Isabella Oliver top by Megan Neilsen. Here's her post about it.) The pattern was free when I downloaded it, but it looks like it's $5 now.



Anyways! I was determined to make this top, even though I'd never had success sewing with stretch fabrics in the past. I did my research, bought the right needles for my machine, and had a go. Good thing it worked, because the only place I could find 4-way stretch was John Lewis, and it was a bit spendy. (I have enough left over to make a pair or two of baby trousers though, so win!)

And here's a side shot of the bump. 35 weeks! And I totally need a haircut.

new-old skirt

Years ago, when I lived in Boston, I had this skirt. It was black with a black flowery organza overlay, and I bought it at a thrift store. I loved it, even though it had a tear and I had to pin up the waistband because it was too big. I had a grand plan to remake it, and found some fantastic back velvet burn-out for the top layer.

Then I moved to Vermont, and then Seattle. The fabric, and the dream, came with me. The old skirt fell to pieces and was thrown away. In Seattle, I laid out the fabric on my expansive hardwood floor (the cat always loves this) and cut it. I taught myself to do a French seam, masterfully attached the waistband, and put in the best invisible zipper I've ever done.

And only then did I bother to try it on. It was too big. WAY too big.

So it went into a box and got shipped across the Atlantic to me, where it sat for another three years until I got to feeling like if I screwed up resizing it, I'd at least be trying. And it worked! I even redid the French seam. The waistband has a seam in it now, and that's the only evidence that anything was done to it,



I did the hem using the rolled hemmer foot on my machine. It's not perfect, but you have to look pretty close to see that, so I count it as a win. And just look how it spins! Made of win.

making a rub-off pattern

How to go from this dress:

to this dress:


without taking the original apart!

First I laid the dress flat onto the floor. This was originally an "easy" pattern, and I knew that the grain line of the dress was straight up and down. I matched the grain line of the muslin to the dress and pinned the two together. Then I carefully rubbed over all the seams with tailor's chalk, which is what you see here.



I did this for five pattern pieces, the four that made up the body of the dress, and the sleeve cap. I didn't bother with the belt as it was just straight and long.

Then I sat down with the dress and made extensive notes on construction.



I bought some pattern paper and dressmaker's carbon and worked to fix the details of the rub-off,



before transferring it to pattern paper.



You can see above that this is where I added in separate pattern lines for the contrast hem. I folded the pattern vertically for the front and back pieces so that the pattern would be symmetrical. I made certain that the pockets and the neckline were the same shape and would line up.

Then, it's just like any other pattern: transferring it to fabric, and sewing it up. My biggest problems were with the sleeve caps, which had been hard to make a rub-off of. I fought with them for two and a half hours before successfully sewing them!

Now I have a dress pattern which I can copy or modify to my heart's content.

(The original dress was sewn in 1980 by my mother, of Marimekko fabric in the "Dombra" pattern. Despite all my efforts, I have never been able to locate the pattern.)

many years in the making

It's finished! After first hearing about a "rub off" pattern a couple years ago, I have finally completed mine!

It fits quite nicely, and I'm happy with the weight of the fabric and with my sewing. The only thing I would have changed is to make the both the belt and the contrast hem wider, but alas, I ran out of fabric. I may change the topstitching on the collar to red, but otherwise it's pretty darn near perfect. (And it's what I wanted, a good comfortable outfit to wear while teaching!)

For comparison with the original: