Vintage with a Modern Twist

I got The Pictures  from the photographer this week!  I compressed a few so I could include a hundred quite a lot in this blog post. * Happy, happy sigh * Do pour yourself a cup of tea, and enjoy with me: Meeting at the local "Burger Bistro" a few hours before the Matric Farewell …

The Great Brute-ish Sewing Bee: Difficult Fabrics Week(s)

The creation of The Dress resulted in quite a few by-products...for which I vainly try to line up The Daughter for glamorous photo shoots, so I am going to do the unforgivable blog-thing and just post cellphone pictures, so I can get it out of my system and move on! The Vogue 8729 pattern did …

Design Acupuncture

I just have to dedicate a post to this: the finishing of the dress.  Although I planned not to post about it again until The Big Day, it is still dominating my life too much to ignore! Today was dedicated to cutting shapes out of the lace remnants and then melting the edges of the …

Vogue 8729: Bodice with Shadow-sweetheart Neckline Modification

Making steady progress, let me just say we can call this one: "It Is All About The BASTE." I have never basted so much and so carefully on any project EVER! And let me also just say: yesterday we went shoe-shopping. (Unsuccessfully so far.). In the shops it felt like every second dress had a …

We have a test dress!

It fits! It actually fits! 100%! I made a first muslin (left picture) with the bodice in one layer of test-taffetta and the skirt in the actual lining I am going to use for the dress.  The grey skirt was a test for the previous plan. I am now first going to shelve the green-and-grey …

How we came to settle on Vogue 8729

*Insert shamey-facey-emoticon here* I worked on developing the foundation for The Dress until a long weekend dawned and we left to spend glorious time with our horses, no sewing allowed. Many hours, I worked trying to figure out that foundation. Manymanymany hours. Starting out with an internet sew-along for a boned foundation, which should have …

It is going to be The Purpleblueorange Firebird dress!

Some time ago I started on the test dress I am making to develop a pattern for my daughter's Matric Farewell dress. That is half finished and enduring daily judgement on my dressform, but I should not to show the thing anywhere remotely resembling social media, because a matric Farewell Dress should be a Deeply …

About worn-out “jeanpants” and cheap dresses for cheap girls.

The last few weeks had been more-or-less-sew-less. Except for some long-overdue alterations and hectic wardrobe purges. I discovered the programmable darning stitch on Herr Pfaff is MAGIC.  Can you see from the outside where the seat of my jeans had been darned? Of course you can't! Or you are just too courteous to wonder how …

‘Not-the-Valentine’ dress

One day, when I popped into a fabric store for something small, a roll of printed silk just ambushed me. It was irresistible, so I brought some home with not much of an idea how it would end up. But the background story for Not-the-Valentine Dress really begins with my return to sewing two years ago …

Memory Lane: My Son’s Dashing MF Outfit

  Instead of working, I am going to traipse down memory lane.  Last year I wanted to start bloggin more regularly but didn't get around to it much, so at the time I created the Matric Farewell outfit for Big Son I did not document the process except for the final results on PatternReview. I …