Red Ponte Dress with a Twist

The PatternReview Sewing Bee is underway once again! The first round challenge was set as "Knit Dress with Twist". Since dresses are my most common project I knew this one was for me. 

I puzzled a bit over what twist to add to my dress -- should it be a physical one? A conceptual one? I came up with a number of ideas and sketched them out but they felt very complicated. And I wanted to only make something I could wear, no stunt sewing for me this time around. 

Finally I thought of an idea that would look nice and be wearable. I had some burgundy red ponte in my stash that I've been wanting to use for a while now, and some scraps of black ponte from a recent Burda dress. They came together with the simple silhouette of Cynthia Rowley Simplicity 2054 to make this dress. This was a perfect pattern to use as there were no bust darts or extra seams to worry about.

To create a "twist" for this project, I inserted a strip of black ponte into the front pattern piece. This meant that I traced off the front pattern piece and split it into 3 pieces, remembering to add seam allowance to all the newly created seams. I made the insert off-centre (one edge was centre line) and at a 3" finished width, and added my twist feature to the insert. The twist is made with strips of the burgundy ponte, simply twisted once around at one end, and stitched down. The funny thing is that they are kind of like a mobius twist - I discovered that they can change the twist direction without my input. 

The other changes I made were to add pockets, using a cotton broadcloth. Using a woven for pocket bags helps to reduce stretching in the pocket area, I find. I also added 1.5" to the hem-- and I am quite short. This is a shorter dress as designed but I wanted it at knee length. I'm not much for short skirts! 

I really like the effect of the colour blocking in this dress, and it definitely wasn't one I was expecting to have in my closet prior to the Sewing Bee! This dress was enough to put me through to Round 2 of the Sewing Bee...and the challenge is Collars. And that's what I'm focusing on this week. We'll see how it goes!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: the Great British Sewing Bee Week 5

Great British Sewing Bee Week Five!

Reduce, Reuse & Recycle... this was my week on the Great British Sewing Bee! I would have cleaned up. I make a lot of things from scraps, by reusing/refashioning other garments, and by using home decor fabrics to make clothes.

I really enjoyed this week, and seeing the ways in which people used their own offcuts to make something new and wearable. It was quite shocking how many scraps they'd created over the first five weeks of the show: as Patrick said, home sewers waste about 30% of the fabric that they buy. Yikes!

I try to reduce the level of my scraps in many ways -- I use a lot of cotton in my garment sewing, which then goes into my quilting scrap buckets. And the dress weight fabrics go into my art quilt scrap pile! I like to use up bigger scraps in new projects for pocket bags, trims, bias, to cover buttons, as accents and so on. You can also use the right kind of scraps to make brooches, badges, and so forth. Fortunately my city now has a textile recycling program, so the tiny bits and thread ends and so forth go into a big bag under my sewing table -- when it's full, off it goes to the recycling bins. Of course, you can also use those tiny bits as filler for a scrapbuster like the Pouf from Closet Case Patterns! 

Another way I try to reduce my fabric waste is through upcycling fabrics -- a lot of my stash has come from thrift stores (including lots of sheets, duvets, pillowcases etc.. or gifts from older sewers clearing their stashes.

Here are just a few of my garments made from old sheets, a pillowcase, and a purple duvet cover. I still have enough of that to make a matching dress if I want to ;)

There was also a dress made from a tablecloth with matching cape from a variety of dresses cut up and reassembled, which I made for a local Refashioning fashion show last year, and which was modelled by a friend. It was a lot of fun. (You can see  full info plus this outfit in motion in my original post.)

I have lots of ideas to use up more of my scraps by making some pillow covers, and maybe a journal cover or two. Then of course I'll have to make a matching pencil case for the journals. If you want to use your dress weight fabrics for these kind of craft projects you can fuse them to some lightweight interfacing first, so that they act more like a cotton when you are piecing them all together. There are so many ways to reduce your waste. What are some of your favourite scrap busting/waste reduction projects?

Pattern Review's Great Sewing Bee, Part I

This month Pattern Review is doing a really fun contest, modelled on the Great British Sewing Bee (a show I really love) It's set up so that's there is an assignment each week, and then you find out if you go on in the competition at the end of each challenge. This first week was an A-Line Skirt; I joined in, but alas, will not be moving on. Probably a good thing; now I can cheer for everyone else while getting busy on all the Christmas sewing I have in the queue! And pushing myself to do this in a week (actually less) really helped me get over that 'sewing block' I've had for the last month or two.

For my attempt, I used a vintage pattern that I have had in the stash for a while, Simplicity 9825. I also used some navy polycotton from my stash, and made a contrasting waistband from a floral sheet with nice blue/purple tones in it. The skirt pattern was only 17 inches long but instead of lengthening it I added a contrasting hem band of the same floral.

Lapped zip at centre back, a tiny hook & eye (gah, I hate those things) and a lining. I used some pretty mauve lining that my husband uncovered when he cleaned up my sewing space ;)

I had fun doing this, even though 3 of the 7 days of the challenge were taken up with my being away from home. I sewed like the wind the rest of the time -- until the late nights, resulting in dark pictures. But one of the results of my weekend away was that I discovered a style of embroidery called Kantha, which comes from the region of Bangladesh/West Bengal. (one of the people at the class I was at also ran a charity selling hand-stitched scarves from that area) Kantha is a style that uses a simple running stitch that adds some really nice texture to cotton fabrics (often old saris) It can get a lot more fancy too -- but I just wanted to try this out with the basic stitch. So I stitched the waistband and hem band as contrast.

It was a lot of fun, and I really, really like how it turned out. It feels pretty and it fits, yay! Here are more pics.

Closeup of my attempt at Kantha

Such pretty lining