Bluebird of Friendliness

It is mid-January and actually almost cold outside so that's the perfect time to try out a pattern for a breezy loose caftan-y dress, right?

Simplicity 9153 from 1989 is illustrated like this

and my first inclination was to cringe, because I have always been a Sewing Snob who refused to even consider sewing something as simple *scoff* as an extended sleeve like this.  (I think they're technically a kind of kimono sleeve, but...that's not how real kimono sleeves are made, either, so that only redoubled the Snobbery.)  I had the idea, though, that I could use this to make stuff for friends who were larger pattern sizes than I was, so I went ahead and thrifted it.

Time passed and then I had the whole "accept that the size I am now is not the size I was three years ago and that probably won't ever be the size I am again, so eliminate all the things that don't fit including patterns and let's see what we have to start over with" epiphany and came to consider using this pattern to make something for me. (But without cutting any of original tissue pieces so the option is still absolutely there to use it to make stuff for other people.)  My current bust size is right between 16 and 18, and this pattern offers 14-16 Medium or 18-20 Large on that end of the size range.  I decided to go ahead and cut the bodice in the large, just to get an idea of fit.

I changed a few of aspects of the dress, of course--mostly making the neck line a bit  higher and a lot rounder, and also using a lot less fabric for the skirt, ending up with something shorter and considerably less full.

And you know what?  The only reason I won't flat-out say that it's too big is because there's no such thing as too loose in this kind of dress.  I probably would have been fine cutting the bodice in medium.



The cotton seersucker is from a local doll person's very generous craft destash late last year, and the birds are because I was worried that the dress would look a bit plain, because in my mind plaid is a neutral.

I started with the idea that I would use the solid blue, because it almost sorta barely matches one of the blue tones in the plaid, and then I considered the other solid fabrics I had and came up with the blue bird motif after that.  I used CorelDraw to do a quick vector illustration of the perched bird, printed the outline as a pattern, cut out the pieces, then decided it wasn't large enough so went back and designed the flying version--whose size was limited by how much of that bit of blue cloth I had left.  The stars were last-minute additions, cut freehand (more were cut out than were usable, heh) and at that point I had long abandoned the idea of using properly coordinating colors so I grabbed the nice green just because I thought it might help me accept the yellow stripes on the seersucker.  Sure.

I went with dark blue Saba C thread for the satin stitching (and eventually for the dress construction) because, at that point, adding another color seemed like just the right thing to do.  And I backed everything with one of the hundreds of embroidery stabilizer squares I thrifted a while ago

Yeah, there are raw edges sticking out everywhere.  Let's just say it's part of the easygoing aesthetic of the whole project.

And it is easygoing, if only because of those sleeves

and I'm hoping the seersucker recovers its puckers after being laundered, so the ironed edges stop being so...uh...carefree...  Can you tell I've never made a garment from seersucker before?

I remembered the relatively new-to-me approach of ironing the sleeve hems before sewing the sleeve seams, so that the small sleeve tube doesn't have to be wrestled around and pressed--this way, it's already pressed and only the small edges at the seams have to be unfolded to be stitched, then the edge of the seam is trimmed away and the whole thing folded back up along the ironing lines and it's ready to stitch.

(I did consider adding sleeves to this--I had just enough of the cloth left to do that--but decided, surprisingly, that doing that might be going a bit too far from the original pattern, so might impact my evaluation of how it fits.  Also, "loose summery dress" is an idea that does not have long sleeves.)

The neckline is faced

as it is in the real pattern, I just had to generate a new front facing piece for the round neckline.  Of course I didn't make any record of the neckline changes, just altering things on the fly.  It later occurred to me that I could borrow the front neckline shape (and probably the facing) from some other pattern.

And, view 1 has pockets!

I cut the pockets on the cross grain, because I was still unsure at that point if I was going to add sleeves, so I didn't want to cut into the large piece left over and had to squeeze the pockets out of scraps.  They're maybe a centimeter less deep than they're supposed to  be.

I gathered the skirt with the ruffler foot--always risky, because it's entirely possible the thing will be set too generously and the gathered area will be too narrow and I'll have to pull out the thread and start over.  I was aiming for gathering it too loosely, so the excess could be gathered by pulling up the thread...which is, yeah, like regular gathering, but starting at a width that's closer to where it should be than it is to the full width of the cloth.  Well, it turned out that I set the ruffler foot exactly where it needed to be and it ended up proper width needed.  Huh.

And then I simply turned up the hem and stitched through all layers and was finished with my first dress for my new size.  We'll see how it goes from here--I have a lot more stash cloth to sew through.