A couple of weekends ago I had a trip to Sydney. I went to a musical, an opera, three museums, did some leatherworking classes (more on that in future post) and went fabric shopping in Cabramatta. It was a very busy five days but lots of fun.
I had been hearing about Cabramatta ever since I started sewing lessons. It’s a Sydney suburb that has in its shopping precinct a loop with half a dozen or so fabric shops. The shops are packed with so much fabric it can be hard to move. The prices are good and the quality is too.
In the first couple of shops I didn’t find anything to buy. My shopping list was mostly costume/historical-geared so the very contemporary fabrics weren’t quite what I was looking for. However in the fourth shop, I found a beautiful gold chiffon. I’ve had a
1930s gold lamé evening gown design kicking around for years which this would be perfect for. And only $4 a metre; I bought 10.
The next shop turned up some glorious knits, perfect for the
maxi-dresses I like for day wear. One light grey with a border print is beautiful and the other looks like it is covered in lightsaber blades; I couldn’t pass that up. Usually I have to look in the ~$20m section for these dresses and even that stuff often feels cheap. But here the quality was better and only $6 per metre. Except for the mottled black which they said was better quality, so $8m. I think it dyed my hands a bit when I was folding it up so I'm a bit scared of using it yet. Not sure if it will be a dress or skirt. Hopefully both.
Lastly I found a shop that had an eggshell blue brocade. I’ve been looking out for such a fabric for years to make Eowyn’s victory gown. I was a bit concerned to find it was $17m as I needed a fair bit – and then I found out that it was 3 metres wide. Hurray!
Now, I am ostensibly trying to clear out projects rather than accumulate new ones so when the next weekend came I got straight into sewing the two maxi-dresses.
Because the grey fabric has straight border print and my pattern has a curved hem I needed to make some changes. I traced a new pattern and decided to keep it as the master because not full of adjustments and layers of paper and sticky tape. Then I cut my old pattern to have gores. Though still curved, these pieces were a lot easier to line up with the edge of the print.
The border print also meant cutting the dress down the width of the fabric rather than the length so most of the stretch is going down rather than around me. This means the sleeves are a bit tight to get on. I can’t figure out if there is anything you would make with the stretch going the right way and the border being vertical. Any ideas?
I have made 5 of these maxi-dresses exactly the same now so I decided to do something a bit different with the lightsaber fabric. This time, I used mesh (bought for something else) for contrast sleeves and a double layer neckline. For trim I used double rows of foldover elastic. Also while in Sydney I happened upon a gorgeous pair of shoes by
Kitten D’Amour. They match the dress perfectly.
Usually on these dresses I sew the lining and outside together all at once but to get the double layer neckline I had to start each layer separately. I sewed the shoulder seams and the very top of the back seam and put the elastic around each neckline (the red one is cut 3cm lower).
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| I didn’t want the whole lining to be mesh so just attached a yoke. |
I topstitched the shoulder seam at the neck side to hold the necklines in place and included both layers in the back seam until nearly the top.
For the cuffs, the edge band of elastic is folded around the end of the sleeve and the other row is folded on itself and was sewn on top of the sleeve before I sewed up the seam.
I am very pleased with how these dresses turned out. For two and a half days’ work it's a great start to the sewing year.
