Green Cotton Midi Dress

I found this beautiful cotton fabric in a shop in Sitges dedicated to patchwork. One must visit these patchwork shops from time to time, because they can have beautiful cotton fabrics that can be used for dressmaking as well. 

This particularly is a Kaffe Fassett design and it got my eye at first sight. I bought 2 m (it is only 150 m wide) and I am glad I did, because when its turn arrived I had this midi dress fever, after seeing midi dresses everywhere. 

Having no tan at all, and also I had to wear this dress up the stage to give my graduated students their diplomas, a short skirt is not becoming when seen from bellow, so a midi dress was what I needed. 

The inspiration for the pattern came from Named Taika Blouse dress, but I wanted to use my old patterns and some hacking to get there. After the modifications I made for my previous midi dress, I just had to shorten the sleeves, draw a V-neck line and a centre front partition with the matching 2 cm button stand that continued up to frame the V-neck opening and the back of the neck. I also gave some give to the side seams (4 cm total), because the previous midi dress was quite tight and since this was buttoned at the front, I did not want it to gap between the buttons. 

I am really proud of this one, the result is perfect. I wore it the last  day of the course and I felt perfect for the walk we did in the morning and for the ceremony at the end of the morning. It is going to get quite a lot of wear, it ticks all the boxes, specially for spring and autumn.

 

Denim Mini Shirt Dress

 ...or how to get away with 1.5 square meters of fabric, haha!

Well, that fabric had been in my stash for a couple of years, with the idea of making some jeans... but then I thought it was too thin for that, and when I finally decided to give it a go and put the jeans pattern on it, I saw it was totally not enough, thanks to the unusual 1.5 m width instead of 1.70. No jeans, not even pirates could be made out of it... so I got the inspiration while wearing this other dress, which is a pattern from Burda Style magazine that I almost threw away at the beginning of the season due to lack of shoes-to-go-with-it inspiration. I literally rescued it from the waste bin when I mentally matched it with combat boots. 

I had to perform a massive hacking in that pattern. First, I transformed the princess seams into darts going up and down from the waist band, which I added. I then made a typical denim dress yoke, drawing it by hand in the paper pattern, both in the front and back bodices. Finally, I added a couple of cms in the armscyes bottoms to compensate to the lack of sleeves. I used the same collar and collar stand, which were perfect, and I made some belt loops for the waist band. 

I looked and looked in my remnants stash (the little pieces of fabric I keep after making a project) until I found this stripped red and white seersucker fabric, which became a perfect match. 

The final result was so lovely, I was surprised. The perfect fit. Very happy with it.