Overload of dresses

Before all the pics of the recent dresses I made, I want to show a picture from a website I came across recently. This company is selling beautiful dresses, but on a second look, it's a Feliz! sewing pattern made up. Can you imagine having the cheek to use that and market it in such a large scale. Not only that, but the Laguna skirt from Studio Tantrum and Patty Youngs Kyoko and Sydney are also on the site, the latter two are even made up in Patty Young fabric! Oh, and to even top that, they call their Feliz 'Patty'. All these patterns are copyrighted, most of them I have, so seeing a company being this blatant is unpleasant and must be so upsetting for the designers.

Back to my own sewing ..........

I'm almost finished the Lonsdale Dress by Sewaholic. I was going to shorten it quite a bit but after seeing the pictures, I think I'll just sew a narrow hem.

The two dresses below are for my nieces 7th birthday. I wanted some pictures of them, so my daughter had some fun trying them on, odd socks and all!
The orange dress (my niece specifically wanted an orange dress - this is the girl who wanted the green dress at Christmas) is made from a sewing magazine Sue & Blu #3080, 2006 with Anna Maria Horner 'Innocent Crush' fabric. I sized up the dress to size 8 to make sure it would be long enough. This was the second of the 2 birthday dresses I made and I wanted something easy to sew where I wouldn't be forever finishing seams. So it's a bubble dress.

Very straightforward to sew, all seams hidden and no zip, just 2 buttonholes, with lovely patterned shell buttons from my stash.

I even made belt loops, which are a bit twisted, but much improved on my first effort. There is no belt in the pattern, but the dress looked too wide for my niece, so I added it a simple ribbon belt which worked perfectly.

I lined it in white rather than any other colour because it seemed to brighten the orange on the outside.

Of course, the requisite bag, made from the Japanese pattern I've used many times before.

Another action shot!

The second dress (which I sewed first) is a combination of 2 patterns, the Analise from Portabellopixie for the bodice and Studio Tantrum/Farbenmix Redondo for the skirt. I had decided for quite a while that the skirt would be the Redondo, but it took me ages to settle on a bodice pattern. I make these dresses without my niece's measurements, so I'm always trying to make sure they're adjustable in some way. The elastic and shoulder straps of the Analise were ideal.

The Analise is easy to sew. I made 2 changes to the pattern - adding 4 more rows of elastic to the back, which means the back of the dress lies flat even with the straps tied which is not the case in the pattern pictures. The other change was to cut the underarms higher because these seemed to be too low, also in the pattern pictures.

My fanatical seam finishing continues ..... I sewed flat-felled seams on every curved seam to neaten the inside, hence, my choice of an easy bubble dress after.
The flowery fabric is Heather Bailey and the purple is Kafe Fassett, and I bought all these from Quilt home.

The bag pattern is a drawstring bag and was adapted from a picture I saw in the 2009 Sue & Blu magazine, because I wanted it ruffled like the dress.

Finally, the Redondo part of the dress. What a fun pattern! I added an extra panel so I could have an even mix of colours, this meant I had to do some calculations on the pattern pieces to make sure they would fit to the bodice.
The pattern pieces are like a puzzle, and when I had the fabric cut out, I had no idea how I would make the curved seams fit together, really NO idea, even after reading the translation of the pattern instructions.

Once I realised that the inner circle of one piece was only sewn halfway down the outer circle of  another piece, it started to come together. Two other tricks helped: sewing the curved seams with the fabric to the right (rather than the usual left) of the sewing machine needle and foot made these curved seams dramatically easier to sew; and tapering to zero seam allowance at the hem made hemming the skirt much easier.

On the day of my niece's 7th birthday, she opened the bag with the dresses, pulled out the orange one and put it on - a happy Birthday girl! and a happy sewist!!! Pin It Now!  

First Custom make - Finale!

This is really getting dragged out, but I had waaaaayy too many pictures for one post.

So this jacket (3904) was decided on - also from the same Sue&Blu magazine. This was a very straightforward pattern, but it was trying to fit in these pattern pieces on the fabric layout that caused the biggest headache, trying to make sure I had enough fabric.

I was so short of the navy, the belt at the back of the dress is like patchwork as I used so many pieces to make it.! Luckily I had bought white and navy fabric myself for the lining.

I finished all the inside seams with white binding, which made the jacket look neat inside and out.

Initially I thought it looked too much together with the dress, but it has grown on me - and my niece looked very elegant in it.

As a special treat for my niece who is only 10, and because she loves animals and had been so patient for fittings - I sewed some Farbenmix ribbons with animals to the inside of the jacket. She loved them!

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'Custom' Make - Part 2

The only colour material my sister could get was the navy/white, which also happened to be my favourite. There was a bit of a saga to buying the material which involved her reopening an old bank account because the seller wouldn't take credit cards/paypal!

The border pattern on the fabric meant that the pattern layout and cutting took me quite a few hours.



As I had made a muslin, sewing the dress up was straight forward. There is netting to give the skirt shape, and I lined the whole inside to make sure it would be comfortable to wear.






The neckline looks uneven in these pics, because the dress was only pinned at this stage.

I had considered making the shoulder straps adjustable, but after another fitting (my poor niece) I decided they didn't need to be.

My sister decided the dress needed something over it.............(Part 3!)

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My first 'custom' make - Part 1

My sister wanted something dressy for her daughter (my niece) to wear to her other daughters communion, so I got a 'commission' to make a dress!!

She decided on one from the Sue&Blu 2009 magazine no. 3911 (bought from DotsnStripes)




and it was this pattern appealed to her most, so she went on an online search for the fabric. She used some of the links given on this Dutch website



I had sewn for this niece before so I was a bit 'cool' about taking measurments (didn't take any)and had the idea (thankfully) that I would make a wearable muslin (which turned out unwearable!).

Sue&Blu and Bizzkids patterns are quite similar in writing style and are not the easiest to understand at times because of translation, and I wanted to make some changes to the back panel pieces.


This was the muslin - looking reasonable from the front

but a right old disaster from the back!

I thought I might need to put elastic in the back panel - which would explain the white stitching, and I used ribbons to hold the straps - definitely NOT a good look. When my niece tried this on, it was too short, too tight even when the elastic was taken out, and the changes I made to the straps just did not look good .

To be continued............

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