Sheer & White

After cutting the pieces for the previous shirt, there was still a decent amount of fabric left, so I decided to see if I could eke out a short sleeve version of the same kind of shirt.

Yes, I could.

 

Sheer & Black

One of the fabrics I got in that Fabric Mart order was a low price nylon point d'espirit netting.  Something about the grungy dark olive ground, with pink-accented white flowers outlined in black, made me think it needed to be a peasant-style blouse, to layer under jumpers when the weather warms up.

Now, while the existence of (most of) these jumpers still remains theoretical, the shirt is a reality.

 

Another Rayon Peasant Dress

I made a peasant dress from rayon (from the generous friend's relative's destash) in March, and have worn it a lot more than I expected, even discovering that it layers nicely over a turtleneck in winter.  So, when the last visit to the craft thrift store turned up three yards of 56" wide rayon, I got it with the express intention of making another peasant dress.

This style of dress gets all of its shaping from elastic, is extremely comfortable to wear, and looks terrible on the hanger.

All Angles Anachronism

After all that dedication to (eventually) changing the serger thread to black, you'd think I had more things planned to sew with it. (Granted, what I do know I want to sew with it, I have not, at this time, wanted to sew.)  

I poked around the fabric stash and eventually decided I would use a very 1990s print mostly-purple rayon, and eventually settled on using it for a slip (cut first, not yet sewn) and another peasant dress based on Simplicity 9866.  I did not check the posts I'd made about making the previous two versions, and I had forgotten that I had been experimenting with sleeve length--I mean, yeah, I saw that there was a shorter traced paper version of the sleeve, but I didn't remember the circumstances, so I used the original dress's sleeve pattern.  At this point, it's so far from the Otome no Sewing project that it's no real concern.

I am amused that this uses a 1990s print to make a 1940s silhouette using a 1970s pattern modified to mimic a 2010s magazine project.

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:

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.