Day 247-the housewife is complete!

following on from yesterday...

so i got to the point where i had two dresses, the outside and the lining

and then i realised "oh crap" how can you sew it together and turn it inside out??

because I do not have any instructions I have obviously taken a few steps in the wrong order...

I ended up just unpicking all the pieces at the shoulder seam (as pictured below)

then when all the seams were bagged out finally joined the shoulders (I would not recommend doing it this way, i ended up hand sewing the shoulder seams, way too time consuming!)

its complete! i even made a rose with the left over stripe fabric and pinned it on as a brooch

Voila! all ready for summer!

 real noice!!!

 you can see here the side view with the mismatched patchwork of panels

 side view again

 back view

all this made from two old skirts, part of an old table cloth and another few scraps of fabric!

craft out critters

xxoo

Day 246- 50's housewife dress

So I thought i'd better break steer away from the blackboard cut outs for a few days at least!

Today's project is to make a dress using some of those great vintage fabrics that were kindly donated to me a few weeks back! I have based the pattern on my favourite dress which i bought some time back, its sort of "1950's housewife style", and I love it!

My old dress and the new pattern

I started pulling out all the vintage fabrics and realised I was going to have to mix and match panels as I did not have enough of any one fabric

I chose this bold 60's floral for the bodice

 I cut up an old stripey skirt for the front of the dress (keeping the pocket as a feature)

 Then cut the waistband out of this super bold blue (which is also from an old skirt)

it took me nearly 4 hours to cut all of these pieces out! the dress is fulling lined and faced, so lots of pattern pieces

there was not quite enough stripes for the back of the dress, so i have cut another floral (see below)

I think it still works with all these mis-matched fabrics because of the blue colour palette on all of them.

After 4hrs of cutting and then 3 of sewing there is still probably another hour left to finish attaching the lining and the zip, so i will save that for tomorrow's post.

It really does make you appreciate being able to buy a basic item from target or k-mart for $10 or $20 when you actually make a whole garment from scratch.... It really does take alot of time and effort!

Craft out folks

xxoo