New Look 6000, again

Finally, my sewjo appears to be making a cautious but welcome return. I've made a new dress - entirely unplanned and, for once, not in a vintage style!

It's a pattern from the 21st century!

When I went to the preview of the Bedazzled exhibition the other week, guests were encouraged to wear their most sparkly outfits. Unfortunately for me, the most/only sparkly thing in my wardrobe was the purple version of New Look 6000 view C with its beaded buttons.

The sum total of bling in my wardrobe

Given that I made it back in July 2012, I wasn't sure if I would still be able to get into it! To my amazement, I could, and wearing it again reminded me just how much I liked it. So much so that I decided on a whim to make a new version, using a stashed length of blue/grey fabric. It is suiting weight, slightly stretchy, and was part of a bundle of sewing stuff that I had bought in a charity shop because I wanted something else in the bundle.

New dress!

There isn't really a lot to say about the construction. I made the sleeves a little longer and omitted the cuffs as they are a nice feature, but bulky. Something which can't be worn with a jacket or cardi over the top was fine when I worked in a warm office - nowadays, not so much! I had also forgotten just how much New Look patterns run short on me; even though I had lengthened the skirt, it still needed a seam binding finish in order to make the hem as tiny as possible. Finally, I definitely need to learn how to do a full bust adjustment on a sheath dress, as it's undoubtedly snug in that area. Overall though, I'm happy.

#sewnshownseated

I'm particularly pleased with the button on the collar. I wanted to do some sort of beading again, but couldn't think what. Then I remembered this hair ornament which Dante Gabriel Rossetti used in several of his paintings.

Clockwise from top left, details from: Monna Vanna, The Beloved, A Christmas Carol, Mariana, The Bower Meadow

I drew a spiral freehand on some tearaway stabiliser (accidentally in the opposite direction to the original!), and sandwiched the fabric between this and a scrap of cotton to stop it from pulling out of shape. I sewed down a small cabochon at the centre, then couched a string of silver beads around this and along the spiral, and removed the stabiliser. Finally, I did single stitches in silver thread between the rows of beads, and arranged the end result over a large self-cover button. Because the fabric underneath blends into the dress, I feel that it gives a similar effect to the Rosetti ornament.

Close-up of the button

Finally, this unplanned project is another reduction on the Stashometer.

I'm amazed that I've used that much, tbh

It may only be a couple of metres, but with less than two months to go to the end of the year, I'll take any win I can get!

Granny's collar

Granny T, my mum’s mum, died when I was very young, and so I never really knew her. Granddad T died when I was ten, and when we were clearing the house we found a drawer full of Granny T’s sewing stuff at the bottom of a wardrobe. In there was a partly-made collar of bias tape and ric-rac, tacked onto a sheet of brown paper. Some of the pieces had been sewn together, and clearly the idea was that once all the strips had been attached to each other, the tacking could be removed.

I was fascinated by this, and kept it for a while. I never stitched any more of it however, and it must have been thrown away in a clear-out. I always remembered the idea though, and recently decided to give it another try.

For the dress I stuck with tried and trusted New Look 6000. The look was to be all about the collar, not the dress, so I wanted something simple. For the fabric I turned to my hefty stash of dress weight cotton remnants.

The fabric - duck-egg blue with cream, gold, brown and grey motifs

The collarless neckline of the pattern was slightly wider than I wanted, so I redrafted it.

New Look 6000, view E

Then I laid the front over the back at the shoulder seam to get the full neckline curve from centre front to centre back, and drafted a collar shape.

The collar pattern

Next I cut the collar out in thin card.

Made into a template

And drew round it onto a piece of brown paper, taking care to mark the front and back.

The collar base

I bought ric-rac and satin bias binding in colours as close as I could find to the colours in the fabric, plus some beige lace to put over the cream binding. Then I tacked alternating strips of the binding folded in half and the ric-rac onto the brown paper. The ends overlapped what would become the top edge of the collar. I worked on both sides of the collar at the same time, rather than make one complete side and then the other. If you don't work this way, then the second side always looks much better than the first. (Trust me, I learned this the hard way on a much earlier project!)

The first rows of binding and ric-rac

Once everything was tacked on, starting from the outer edge, I sewed the ric-rac to the binding where the edges met, and also overcast the folded edges of the binding together.

The full set, first attempt

It was only when I came to the innermost row of cream binding that I realised I had a problem. The collar was deeper than the rows of ric-rac and binding, so the inner edge of the binding did not meet the inner edge of the collar.

The gap between the collar inner edge and the binding

I took out that row of binding, and marked the inner edge of the collar with pin holes.

The inner edge marked with pin holes

Then I pressed a new piece of satin binding first flat, and then in half. I pinned the binding in place against the ric-rac, and then tacked along the pin holes marking the inner edge.

The replacement binding tacked down (sorry it's so hard to see)

Then I attached the beige lace along the tacking line.

The completed collar, still on the paper

Once all the strips were sewn together, I took a deep breath, unpicked the tacking, and removed the collar from the paper. It all stayed together! Then I pinned the collar onto the dress, and attached the facing along the inner edge of the lace.

Dress, front view

Collar close up

Dress, back view

I wasn't sure how well (or even, if) this was going to work when I started, but I'm really pleased with the end result. I've no idea where Granny T got the idea from, but I'm glad that she tried it, and kept the unfinished result.

The purple dress

After the trauma that was the "If It Can Go Wrong" dress, this one came together easily. Possibly the fact that I had plenty of both time and fabric helped!

I used New Look pattern 6000 again, but this time view C. I knew that I wanted some sort of contrast for the collar and cuffs, but I didn't want anything too pronounced. I considered some sort of overlay, but the solution was far more straightforward. The fabric I had bought was a lovely marrocaine crepe in a deep berry purple, with one side shiny and smooth and the other matt and textured. I simply used the fabric matt side out for the dress, and shiny side out for the collar and cuffs. Of course, using the same fabric meant that there were no issues with colour matching.

Matt dress with contast collar and cuffs

The pattern illustration showed the dress with buttons sewn on to collar and cuffs. Because the fabric was plain, and the lines of the dress quite simple, I decided to liven it up a bit by making hand-embellished buttons decorated with beading and embroidery. Unfortunately such details don't tend to launder well, so the solution was to make them removable.

The cuffs were easy. I made buttonholes on the front and back of the cuff, and cufflinks from self-cover buttons. These consisted of the embellished button at the front, and a slightly smaller button covered in plain fabric, matt side out, at the back. The two were fastened together with shirring elastic.

For the collar I made buttonholes at either end, and also in the dress itself, but not in the neck facing. This time the 'cufflink' was made from a large embellished button, and a flat, two-hole button at the back. This enables the fasten to lie smoothly on the dress, and the neck facing prevents the back button from rubbing against my skin.

Collar unfastened, showing the three buttonholes

I was so pleased with the buttons/cufflinks that I made a second set, this time plain. There is a picture of the dress with the plain buttons here.

Button 'cufflinks' - plain and embellished, double and flat

The "If it can go wrong" dress

There are some projects which just don't want to work. More often than not, it's when there is a shortage of time or materials involved, and in this case I was short of both.

Along with some of the Ya Raqs girls I was going to a dance show where some of my costumes would be on display, and I decided that I really ought to wear a dress I'd made myself. I decided to use New Look pattern 6000. Unfortunately other projects got in the way, so I started rather later than planned. Things started to go awry when I pre-washed the material, as I always do. This was how I discovered that my idea of 'hand hot' water is hotter than the 30 degree wash recommended for the fabric. The black dye ran, badly. It was worse in some places than others; in some areas it was barely noticeable, whereas other parts were unusable. Unfortunately nowhere was there an unmarked stretch long enough for the main dress pieces.

Dye run disaster

There was however nearly enough, so I considered how and where to join the usable parts together. The plan I came up with was for a separate yoke, the width of the shoulder seams, edged with black piping. So that this wasn't the only place on the dress with piping, I decided  to add it to the bottom of the sleeves as well. I drew new pattern pieces and tried laying them out on the material. Bizarrely, given the state of the fabric, I was able to cut all the pieces so that the pattern matched perfectly along the piped join. There were a few areas where the colour run was apparent, but only if you looked closely.

I had never made and used my own piping before, and there were a few false starts and a lot of time wasted before I got this right. However I eventually got the yoke joined to the dress front and backs, and the sleeve ends piped and faced.

The next challenge was attaching the sleeves. This was where I began to regret making the yoke the full width of the shoulder seam. Setting in sleeves is always a bit tricky, and having the piping to negotiate as well would make it even worse. Fortunately, in a rare moment of things going well, I thought about this before I sewed the dress side seams up. Instead of setting the sleeves the usual way, I attached the flat sleeve pieces to the flat dress piece first, and then sewed the sleeve and side together in a single seam.

Because the fabric was such a bold pattern, I didn't want to detract from it with contrast stitching showing. This meant that the sleeve facings, hem and zip all had to be sewn in several different colours. Black, white, red and maroon threads were all used - not the best thing to be doing when you're short of time. However miraculously, the dress was finished in time, and I wasn't even sewing it in the hotel before the show!

The completed dress

When I got home I tried washing the remaining, stained bits of fabric in a 'colour run fix' product. It worked like a charm,  so I washed dress as well, and it came out sparkling. Obviously if I'd been thinking straight, I would have done this before I started cutting the dress out, but I don't think that the end result would have looked nearly as good. So despite everything that went wrong, the end result was right.

With the girls before the show