My son gave me this pretty daisy fabric for my Birthday and thought it would be nice as PJ’s. As Kwik Sew patterns were half price at the time I decided on K2811
The shirt has front button closures, a collar, a pocket with a pocket band and sleeve cuffs. The pull-on pants and shorts have elastic in a casing on the back and ties on the front.
I cut a size M but as I didn’t have the required amount of fabric it was a bit of a tight squeeze to fit in all the pattern pieces but by cutting the under collar out of a plain white cotton it worked out.
The problem came with the short style bottoms. Seam allowance is only 6mm but I forgot this when sewing them up, also I probably should gone up a size for the bottoms for comfort. They did fit but were a tad too tight for which is not idea for PJ’s, I had already trimmed the seams and over edged them so I couldn’t let the seam out, I got busy with the seam riper and unpicked both side seams and added a strip of white cotton down each side.
Overall this is a good pattern with good instructions, apart from the 6mm seam allowance which is ok if you remember!
I have plans for a set PJ’s in Liberty Tana Lawn with a matching Kimono style dressing gown.
In other news I received an unexpected parcel on Friday
This is the last of my Liberty Tana Lawn I bought from the Alice Caroline Studio sale. My sister fell in love with this design which I think is called Flora Eve, so I made her a quilted hot water bottle cover and a boxy bag for last Christmas.
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Out of the remaining fabric I squeezed out a sleeveless Simple Sew Lottie pussy bow blouse
French seams and self made bias binding give the blouse a nice clean finish.
I managed to get my very reluctant photographer to take a picture of me at Hidcote Manor Gardens.
Never the most regular of bloggers, this break has been longer than I anticipated. After the happiness and excitement of my sons wedding back in May my father was taken ill and after 10 weeks in hospital he sadly died. He was exactly 2 months short of his 94th birthday.
I have tried to blog a number of times in the last month but I found it just didn’t happen, but I have been stitching way.
We are spending a week in a holiday cottage in rural Sussex with lovely views and Wi-Fi, so I am going to try and catch up with my reader and blogging backlog.
So on with the sewing. Tania is a bias tie blouse featured in Love Sewing magazine issue 41, if you didn’t buy the magazine its also available as a free PDF download from Simple Sew.
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More of my sale bargain Liberty Tana Lawn fabric seemed prefect for this simple top, I love this Isle of Wight fabric.
There is not much to say about this make, its very simple and do love any excuse to make and use bias binding.
Mr SSR even reluctantly agreed to take a few photos of the top out in the wild.
At Charlcote Park near Stratford on Avon.
and on the beach at my favourite seaside, Sidmouth, East Devon.
I found a great little fabric shop while we were wandering around the town called Sidmouth Fabric and Haberdashery they stock a good range of quilting and dressmaking fabrics, but I was very good and didn’t buy any more fabric!
And on a trip to the beach, Sidmouth in East Devon.
What could be better than shirtdress in cool Liberty Tana Lawn to wear in this very hot weather we having in the UK. I bought this fabric from a sale at Alice Caroline last year. Occasional Alice Caroline hold a sale from their stone barn studio on the edge of the Cotswolds.
I have lots of shirt dress patterns but I wanted a quick sew and cut out a Maria Denmark Edith dress on Sunday, finished sewing the buttons on Monday after work and wore it to work on Tuesday and it was very cool and comfortable to wear.
I just met the deadline this morning to join in with the #sewingtogetherforsummer on instagram.
I didn’t have enough of this fabric for a shirtdress but I did have for a blouse version of the Edith pattern.
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I can definitely recommend Liberty Tana Lawn as lovely cool fabric for hot weather. I am off to cool down, this laptop is sooo hot on my legs!
I have done very little blogging this year but I have done a lot of sewing. Mostly for my son’s wedding, the wedding dress and my mother of the groom outfit.
It’s been a lot of fun, mostly………….. occasionally when things didn’t go well I did wonder what the hell I was doing. I won’t bore you with lots of details, especially as I didn’t think to take many photos.
The Design Brief
The Bride wanted a white dress, lace, lace sleeves and not long, but not sure what length. After a email exchange of pictures and patterns of what I thought might be suitable we arrived at a very loose idea of a strapless boned bodice with a lace bolero, skirt to be decided later.
Which Pattern
This was narrowed down to
Simplicity 4070
and a pattern in The Wedding Dress by Becky Drinan (Florence Bodice)
I started by taking lots of measurements of the Bride as instructed in the book and using the pull out pattern sheet, marked the measurements and joined the dots to create a custom bodice pattern, then traced the bodice pieces on to grease proof paper (I don’t normally ever trace pattern if I can help it and this is all I had to hand, but it worked really well) So I had a front, side front, side back and back bodice piece.
We had a fitting of the two bodices I had sewn up in some old curtain lining to get some idea of the fit. The bodice from the book was an excellent fit. The Simplicity 4070 was quite good but needed to be shortened.
The next thing I did was to recut the bodices in calico and add the boning, there is lots of information to be found on the internet regarding boning, but I simply stitched cross grain ribbon to create channels over the seam lines into which the boning was inserted. I thought boning would be difficult, in fact it’s really quite simple.
Bodice cut from Calico with boning.
So now I had two bodices for two different dresses but no decision about the length.
I cut the bodices again from an old sheet and stitched them to the calico boned bodice. The skirt for the simplicity pattern was made as per the pattern with no alterations.
From The Wedding Dress book I followed the Florence dress instructions, the book instructs you to draw your skirt pattern, the only large sheet of paper I had was the back of the pattern sheet supplied with the book so this became the length of the skirt pattern. I took the two dresses for the Bride to try on and she chose Florence from the The Wedding Dress book and it just happened the length turned out to be floor length on the Bride and she decided she did wanted a full length dress! But unlike the Florence dress in the book, she didn’t want a corset back or layers of fabric or to change the neckline, she liked it as it was. Keeping it simple.
Florence Toile
Fabric
We both ordered a few fabric samples and settled on fabric from White Tree Fabrics
Duchess Satin for the skirt and Duchess Satin for the bodice with a lace overlay and a lightweight satin for the lining, and the same lace for the bolero.
Dress Construction
The toile was a good fit, but I did need to take out some fabric from the skirt centre back seam, which must of been a error on my part when drawing the skirt pattern.
The toile was unpicked and then used as pattern pieces. The calico boned bodice formed the inner bodice of the dress, which was sandwiched between the main bodice and the bodice lining.
Bolero
The pattern for the Bolero was again from The Wedding Dress book. The lace had two scalloped edges so the back and sleeve hems were cut to use the scalloped borders. For the back of the neck and bolero front I carefully cut the scalloped border from the remaining fabric and and hand stitched it to the bolero front and neck. Satin bias binding covered the side, shoulder and arm hole seams.
We only have few photos so far
If you got this far well done and thanks for reading.
I just couldn’t decide if i was too old to wear a dungaree style pinafore dress, but in the end I just had to have a go, but I didn’t want to spend any money on an expensive pattern, so after some googling around the internet I discovered that Sew Now had a pattern from a past issue that could be download as PDF pattern.
Pinafore dress pattern free in issue 3 of Sew Now magazine.
Of course the downside of this is that I didn’t have the magazine, so no instructions.
The fabric is a very nice pincord from John Lewis, but it attracts every bit of fluff, dust and white cat hair that’s in the house.
It turned out a bit on the large size and I had to take in the side seams. If I make it again I would alter the pattern to make bib smaller as I am quite short waisted and so it’s a bit long and tends to be a bit baggy when I am sat at my desk.
Overall I am really pleased with the dress and I love the pockets!
Oh dear, I really am not very good at blogging consistently, but while we are still in January, I thought I would play catch up and blog my makes from December.
I needed something to wear to the company Christmas Party, a quick make with a pattern that I knew would fit. I had a light bulb moment and decided instead of making a dress I would sew up an evening skirt and blouse, I could wear the skirt again and again with different tops.
I found a suitable fabric online at Croft Mill, called “Days of Yore” ??, described as a good quality evening dress fabric, matt on one side and shiny like a satin on the other. My most used skirt pattern Butterick 5466 only requires 80cm of 150cm wide fabric so at £4.50 per metre it was a bargain. I wish I had made view B, without the waistband which I usually use as it does fit better and I think I will change it before I wear it again. The photo was taken after I had worn it all night so it’s a bit wrinkled.
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For the blouse I decided on a sleeveless version of the Lottie Pussy bow blouse with some Crepe de Chine left over from a dress I made couple of years ago, it was such a small piece of fabric I didn’t have enough to make the bias binding for the sleeve edges or the pussy bow, I got over this by using black satin ready made bias binding and for the bow plain black Crepe de chine, which I think I order from Minerva Crafts.
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I also made a couple of Christmas gifts.
A quilted hot water bottle cover and matching boxy bag in a lovely Liberty Tana Lawn for my sister. Even the bag lining is Liberty! (yay for half price Liberty fabric sale)
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. I trying to catch up with my blog reader and now I just need to blog about January!
