I’m totally cheating this week. I originally made this dress in 2016, but I want to make sure I keep to my posting of once a week. I picked this one because my eyeballs liked the previous green dress & this orange dress together.
I am actually mid new project, (which I will throw a layout photo of at the end of this post), however it was another pretty distracting week. Also, I tend to lean heavily towards very tedious projects. Not helpful either.
I’ve been making some incarnation of this dress since 1999. Some of you may actually have a version of one from back when I was selling dresses. It was from a vintage pattern that I used & altered so many times that the envelope is too disintegrated to get a photo of & the pattern pieces aren’t in much better shape.
My very first version was a really pale lavender babywale corduroy body with an ivory babywale (I’m getting sick of me saying it too) corduroy inset/collar, lace trim & a dark lavender velvet neck ribbon. And here’s a really crappy photo of it:
I fell in love with babywale corduroy the moment I got it. It has a velvety texture, but it’s cotton, washable & super soft & comfy. Plus I really like the look of the tiny line texture. I used to only be able to find it at specialty heirloom sewing shops, but the future is now & I can find it pretty much anywhere these days. And so many more color choices! What a time to be alive.
I believe I actually found this fabric at Joanns. I was extremely excited about the color & as one does when one enjoys sewing, I didn’t quite know what I would do with it, but purchased some anyways.
At some point I decided that it should probably be this dress. I found some vintage velvet millinery ribbon & laid it all out to see if it was worth going through with.
It was. I did. I’m a big fan of the millinery ribbon in that it’s very stiff & stays up in place, unlike my flopping lavender ribbon, however it did get a little bit crushed up from being in the closet for the past few years. I was able to save it though.
I just remembered that I accidentally cut a chunk out of the upper part of one of the sleeves & had to do surgery on it because I had no more fabric to make another sleeve from.
Thanks for reading! And hanging in there during my blog learning curve!
Oh, as I mentioned earlier, here’s my current project layout. Do you all do this too? Lay things out to make sure it looks like it’ll be worth your time & effort? I highly recommend it if you’re not. It not only lets me know if it’s worth my time, but if I really like where it’s going it also gets me all psyched up to get the project finished.
