End of the Green, Revisited

 So, last year I made this skirt, and I was not happy with it.  I thought, though, that it would feel like wearing a nice warm blanket in winter, so I hung it in my closet.

And didn't touch it all winter.

I did a closet clear out recently, and decided that skirt was just so bad that I didn't feel it was appropriate for donating.

However.

There is a skirt in Animal Crossing New Horizons, called the sporty skirt, and available in a green variation.

 

 My character wears it a lot, and, while the pockets are absolutely not the same,  felt like the overall vibe was close enough, so I shortened the skirt I made and have already worn it more than I did all winter (which is to say I've worn it once since I altered it the other day.)

Blue Bomber

 I wanted to use up the rest of the blue knit from the previous project; I had many options, and decided to go with another button-up variation on New Look 6120's bomber jacket.

And while a solid blue jacket would probably have been perfectly useful, we all know I'm going to make things more complicated, but in a way that comes easy to me, which means: appliqués

Blue GuGuu

 The kiddo was bored at a school in-person testing day (he's still doing remote school, so he doesn't have many chances to be bored at school) and drew a very sarcastic picture of Puyo Puyo Carbuncle.  I thought the drawing was fantastic so recently copied it onto freezer paper to make a stencil...which ended up not sticking well to this Walmart mill-end precut synthetic fabric, so my copy ended up with Issues.  I did consider adding more decoration to obscure it, but decided not to over-complicate things.

I turned to the Puyo Nexus Wiki to reference how to write the various forms of "goo" that Carbuncle says, drew the hiragana really fast, and made another freezer paper stencil...which I tried tacking on with masking tape.  The masking tape stuck fine to the slick back of the freezer paper, but not to the fabric, so I ended up holding the paper down with various paint pots.  I did a base layer of white paint for both, and used fabric medium, and still made a mess.  The kiddo thinks it's funny, and that's all that matters.

Swiss Waist Fake

 A proper Swiss waist has hand-worked eyelets, not metal.

I said, pfft, we know me, I don't do hand sewing, so I will finally make something like a Swiss waist, and I will use the grommet machine to apply metal eyelets.

And then I did not heed a friend's advice to punch the holes with the smaller die size, and, while that was not a problem for 7/8 of the eyelets, it was very much a problem for that last one.

How did I solve that problem?

...by hand-sewing over all of the eyelets, making sure to catch the edges that didn't get trapped in that one eyelet, and just covering all the others.

 

 (yes, the recalcitrant eyelet is marked by an overly exuberant amount of Fray Check that did not dry clear.)

Sew It Dress

In 2013, I thrifted this fabric

(wow is that a warm image)  The selvedge reads "The Sew It Book Collection by The Vintage Workshop,Amy Barrickman© for RedRoostar Fabrics DSN # 19755 WWW.redroosterfabrics.com" and yes the mis-spellings and weird spacings are all there on the selvedge.

I prelaundered it in 2015, and then...  I had a vague idea to use it for a simple shirtwaist dress, but, recently, that was replaced with the idea of using it to make another peasant dress, like the recent rose dress, but not quite so much (one reason for making it a little less extravagant was that the fabric was only 40" wide.)

I had just enough paper left on the newsprint roll (that I scavenged from an attic over 20 years ago) to trace off a proper pattern front merging the skirt and bodice from Simplicity 9866.  I still need to overlay the bodice back piece on that traced piece to form the dress back, but I know that I could be lazy and make the front and back the same and it would be fine.  Probably.

So:

Band Together Together

 Jacket

Skirt

Shirt

Slip Shift

 The previous two projects, combined

I did not wear anything even vaguely like this in the 90s, so this is not attempting to recapture my younger days

Web Slip

 I ended the previous project post with a bit of a lament about thinking it looked boring and could use a little something extra.  Maybe a layering item?

Like this

Experiment Shift

 So I took the bodice (modified with a rounded neckline) from Simplicity 9153 and merged an A-line skirt from New Look 6843 and swung it out to be as wide as possible and managed to cut it a bit short but there was enough fabric left for a ruffle and so I ended up with this

It has pockets!

Rose Dress In Action

 

Rose Dress

Misdirected Cinch

Rose Dress

 About a month ago, a friend shared a link to a website with scans of Otome no Sewing, a Japanese sewing publication with sewing patterns for otome kei and lolita clothes.  Lolita style is fairly well known; otome is a predecessor to lolita, from the 1970s and not without notes of Gunne Sax.

Otome no Sewing Book 13 featured a fairly simple dress, a well-established shape with elastic at the neckline and waist for shaping. 

 For whatever reason, it really caught my eye.  The actual Otome no Sewing mooks include full-size patterns, but the directions include illustrations with so many measurements that you could draft patterns from them.  And I thought about doing that!

The idea percolated in the back of my mind long enough to realize that Simplicity 9866 from 1980, which was a pattern I'd grabbed in October during my last visit to the craft re-use thrift store and then wondered what potential I'd seen in it at all, would be really easy to hack into the right shapes

The changes I made were pretty basic: omit the yoke, move the top of the skirt up to the level of the bottom of the armscye, eke out as much width of a bottom ruffle as possible, and make and apply bias tape all over the place to be elastic casings.  And add lace.

 

I got the cloth from the craft thrift store, too.