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:

The changes I made for the rose dress included shortening the sleeves, but I wanted to see how they'd look at the pattern's full-short-sleeve length.  I do think they'd look better shorter, but this isn't unforgivable.

I did my usual approach of pressing the sleeve hems before sewing the sleeves into tubes, unrolling the pressed edges while sewing, then rolling them back into place to sew the hems.

I also used a few different bias tapes that I had made for other projects.

I feel like I've used more bias tape since getting the bias tape maker than I ever used in my decades of sewing before, and I'm pretty sure that's because I don't like the heavily starched, highly polyester feeling of commercial bias tape.  Random 100% cotton bias tape is much more fun.

 I used the original pattern bodice pieces to mark the waist with tailor's chalk, then sewed bias tape along the chalk lines.

 

 The graphics on this fabric were inspired by a 1920s sewing book, which Amy Barickman (one 'r' the selvedge is wrong) had reprinted for modern audiences, as well as was inspired to design a line of fabric based on the book's illustrations.  They are teetering between Charming and Disturbing.  Which is fine.

When I was making the pattern piece, I remembered: pockets!

If I had made the sleeves shorter, I might have been able to eke out a slightly wider hem ruffle, but I had to piece a lot of ruffle width from pieces along the selvedge, and being wider would have mean slightly less of that would have been usable, due to the dress side angles.  Not explaining that well.  Eked ruffles.

The Otome no Sewing dress that inspired the rose dress used the same pattern piece for both front and back, but, for now, I plan to keep making the back piece taller, as much because the sleeve pattern piece expects it as "because I want my clothes to have distinct fronts and backs."

I'm sure I'll make more versions of this dress, both straightforward like this one, as well as with variations, like no elastic at the waist, or following Simplicity 9866 a little closer and making the skirt a separate piece, which means I could do a contrast fabric.  Temperatures flirting with freezing are fooling me into not wanting to make more summer dresses at the moment.  Everything changes, of course.