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If you happened to get a little preview via your blog reader yesterday, I hope you enjoyed yourself…while I was having a heart attack on the other end! It’s the stuff of nightmares, accidently hitting the ‘publish’ button on a post before you’re ready. And of course it was the actual Project Sewn post I was working on! Anyway, suffice to say, it was the end of another big week and I was not on my game come post writing time…
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This week’s Project Sewn theme was a Sundress. An awesome theme. Who doesn’t love a sundress? I know I do. Though living in the sub-tropics they come with certain criteria. Easy to chuck on, must be lycra-free and the more holes the better…got to have good air flow.
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I was kind of relieved to begin this week’s challenge with a clearer idea of where my sundress was headed. I was inspired by this fabric, a luscious silk floral that I won two meters of from Tessuti fabrics last year. Still pinching myself. And the print being so perfectly springtime, it was always going to end up as a floaty and flirty something. I recently made up the Victory Pattern’s ‘Satsuki’ dress(not yet blogged) and thought it would make the perfect base pattern for my sundress. I love the commodious kimono sleeves and the loose fit cinched in only by the waist tie, making it all ‘tight enough to show you’re a woman, loose enough to show you’re a lady’. Is that how it goes? The plan was to give it a major sprucing with cut-outs in the front and a strappy lattice of triangles in the back. Okay, it’s out, I like triangles.
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Okay so I had the ‘what’ figured out, but the ‘how’…guesswork and a whole lotta trial and error. I started by deciding on the dimensions for the front triangles then re-drafted the front neckline (left) to include the cut-outs, changing it from V-neck to round neck in the process. Working out the seaming vs cutting lines here was a little tricky and this template (left) was my third attempt. The next step was re-drafting the back neckline to a deep V, and then both the front and back facings (middle). A proud moment considering less than two weeks ago I would have been all ‘re-what-ing?!’. The original pattern includes facings, which I think makes for a beautiful finish so I knew I wanted to keep using them here. I just figured that backing the front cut-outs with facing, rather than say, folding the edges under or similar, would make them sit nice and sturdy and there’d be no need for top-stitching, which I wanted to keep to a minimum.
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Aaaaah the back. Now this architectural feat of construction that is the triangle lattice was more fiddly and time consuming than anything. I made the straps from pieces cut on the grain, not bias since I didn’t want this part to have any movement. Then it was a matter of lying it all flat and piecing it together. Like assembling an Ikea cabinet without the manual. The most brainstraining bits were making sure the triangles ended up a similar size, figuring out which order to place the straps in and then sewing them on, one entire side at a time to sandwich them between the back facing and the back main piece. Lastly I bound the neckline to join the triangles together in the front and hold the lattice up in the back. But first I bound the whole thing in stretch bias and it wouldn’t hold the back lattice up. Then I did the whole thing in non stretch binding and the front sat lumpy. By which time I was running out of scraps to make more binding! I literally used the last few pieces to make two separate bindings, a stretchy one for the front and non stretch for the back. Presto!
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I’m enjoying leaving the overlocker out of things for the moment and went for French seams again. And used rolled hems all over. Well that, my friends, is it. And I officially have no more to say about this sundress except that I love it just so! And maybe, hopefully, you LOVE IT TOO! In which case you should definitely hop on over to PROJECT SEWN and wield your voting wand…