Show and Tell (Again!)

I  loved Show and Tell when I was a kid.  I still like it as a grown-up.  The nice thing about having a blog is that you can have Show and Tell whenever you want and whether or not anyone is reading your words, it feels like they are…or they could someday.

Yesterday I finished up two sewing projects.  It was a big day.  I would have said I finished them Monday, except that I messed the second one up, felt crushingly tired, and just decided to deal with it on Tuesday.  I think that was a good decision.  So here is the first one.  I’ll post the second in the near future.  Hope you like it!

Exhibit #1…

Remember this dress?  The one above is yet another rendition of the kimono sleeve dress pattern that I copied from an existing dress, but this time using some of my African fabric.  I’ve been holding onto this fabric for years, trying to figure out something to use it for where I could showcase the giant image that reaches from selvage to selvage.  I only wanted to use one repeat for each side, so I had to come up with another fabric to finish off the sleeves.  These two fabrics kept on getting tossed on top of one another (keep your eyes open for a future project with the green fabric), and I liked them, so I put them together.

This dress is probably the best finished garment I have ever made.  Since it involved pretty simple construction–just a front and a back with the extra sleeve fabric added on–I decided to try to do some French seams.  I think they worked out pretty well.  I tried that once on a shirt I made, but you could see the raw edges of the fabric sticking out from the seams.  (If you’ve never even heard of a French seam, Coletterie, a sewing blog I’ve just started following, has a simple tutorial.)  I also hand-sewed the hems on the bottom and sleeves of the dress.  I had been working on my slip-stitch, so this seemed like another good chance to practice it.

The neckline was a bit trickier.  I knew that I wanted a bias edge to show, so I tried this awesome binding foot I found for my Singer Featherweight, but I couldn’t make it work in this case, so I had to rip everything out and sew it again.  That’s progress for me, by the way.  My normal method of sewing involves sort of just running over my mistakes with my machine and sewing it down like crazy people in movies run over things with cars.  Mom and Grandma, you can be proud–I actually ripped something out and redid it (and I smiled in the pictures, Grandma!).

My husband asked if I planned to sew more things with this pattern (this is dress #3 that I’ve sewn, #4 that I own of this style), and I laughed and said no…until he told me that it might look good as a floor-length maxi dress…hm….I guess there are no promises on that.

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