The June dress… again. (Claire Cami from Serendipity Studios)

Hey there woeful eyed donkeys with detachable tails! Even though it’s already TWO DAYS into July, I thought I should still add an official entry to the year of the dress project. I think we can all agree that the June dress HAS to be the Claire Cami dress from Serendipity Studios. Because, guess what? I made another one!

That’s three of these in June. And I’m not done, yet. If you think my sewing blog has gotten boring, what with me only making one pattern over and over, you should see what I’m wearing. Just these three dress – they are that comfy and awesome! I literally don’t think I can have enough of them! (OK, I’m lying. I’m wearing my deer-in-the-woods crepe as I type this…)

For this version I mixed up the prints a bit to give it a bit more of a shirt-n-skirt vibe rather than dress. We’ve had this Oliver & S fabric in the shop for a while and I’ve been in LOVE with the turquoise and orange viney print that I used for the skirt, but haven’t gotten around to making anything from it! I particularly like it with a cardigan with this mix of prints…

Is it a dress? Is it a skirt? What IS it??

Hey! Guys! Are you paying attention? I don’t KNOW where your tails are. Next time, trying stapling them on. Egad.

Well, since this is the third post this month on the same dress I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say on the subject. I changed nothing about the pattern. For construction, I used methods we’d use in the classroom (e.g. easy and time-saving) the seam allowances are pinked as are the edges of the facings. All the facings are in the same viney print as the skirt for a bit of contrast. Funny story – this dress is destined to be a shop sample, so I really wanted to finish it exactly as we would in a class. Unfortunately, I was sewing late at night and rather sleepy, so the skirts side seams are french seams. I forgot I was doing it the ‘easy’ way and went on auto-pilot!

Since I don’t have many details for you on construction, I thought I’d amuse you with this series of photos that showed up from my photo session. Apparently, I prefer my hair PUFFY!! These were all taken within 2 seconds of each other…

Details

Skirt fabric – Oliver + S City Weekend – Park Ramble in Turquoise (available online – also available in cotton knit interlock)

Bodice fabric – Oliver + S City Weekend – Cobblestone in Turquoise (available online)

Trim fabric – Oliver + S City Weekend – Roundabout Dots in Orange Red (available online)

I’ll be teaching this as a class in July! Class dates are July 7th and 14th (it’s a two session class.) If you’re in Minneapolis, come on down and join me! [Register online]

     

Quick note – it’s Moving Weekend! (You don’t need to do anything, I hired movers.)

As I’ve mentioned, I am migrating over to Wordpress. Next time you see a post from me, the site will look a bit different! There may be some down time over the next few days, but look for the next post mid-week! My web address will NOT change, so you need to do nothing, just keep coming back! Just wanted to let you know that (for a change) my radio silence will be for a good reason. Not because I got sucked into petting the basset hound for 10 hours straight and didn’t get anything done!

Finished! My spring-green, stripey, silky, stitched up, wool & leather quilt.

Morning Easter Egger Hens! I’m back from our great trip up north, the quilt has been left on a gift table at the First Baptist Church, Lucy got to run around without a leash and fell in a ditch (no injuries, much laughing) and I got to meet CHICKENS!!! But more about that later this week, today we’ll finally take a look at the wedding quilt, which, to Mr. Bug’s intensely amped-up stress level was finished IN THE CAR and photographed on the way up north. Luckily, we have the most beautiful rest stops in the nation here in the great state of Minnesota…

I thought the back was so pretty it was a shame to wrap it up, plus wrapping a quilt is weird. I mean, who has a box big enough and if you skip the box it’s just a floppy paper-wrapped amoeba. I raided my jewelry box and co-opted my leather bracelets to use as special quilt straps, rolled it into a tootsie-roll and just pinned our tag to it. I used a bit of the same leather in the quilt as I had to make the bracelets, so it was very matchy-matchy.

And of course, I had to include a little tag. Everything’s better with a basset hound on it, right my chicken friends? I bet you LOVE this quilt, what with your penchant for laying green eggs…

{the front}

OK, first lets’ talk about the front! I used a whole bunch of different fabrics including some organic cotton flannel, silk/cotton blends, dupioni silk, cotton voile, wool flannel, silk charmeuse and plain ‘ole quilt-weight cotton. Unfortunately for the new bride (or groom, how they sort out their household chores is a whole different bag of scraps), this quilt will not take kindly to baths. I love giving practical gifts, don’t you agree?

In addition to all my fun fabrics, I did some not-so-fancy stitchin’. There’s a shop close to my house (Needlework Unlimited for curious Minneapolis-based hens) that carries a giant array of handwork supplies, including silk embroidery yarn (like perl cotton, but, you know, not cotton. I’m not familiar enough with the terms to tell you the correct weight!) The best part of the selection (apart from the fact that it’s SILK) is that the colors are much more vivid (and varied) than the DMC offerings at Joann’s. I got a couple colors of green, then ran some basic running stitches along a strip of Kona cotton in Snow. I embroidered the bride and groom’s names (Olin! Great name, isn’t it?) and their wedding date on one of the strips. Everything was totally freehand – I didn’t even trace out a pattern - and it cracks me up that the letters look EXACTLY like my handwriting!!

 

I embroidered one other strip by hand as well – just a scroll of running stitches with little sunburst flowers. Both white strips were 4” wide, if that helps give you a sense of scale.

I quilted with straight lines of stitching to either side of the seams. I’m not sure if there’s a name for this style of quilting. It took FOREVER, but I am incredibly bad at stitching in the ditch, plus I thought the double lines of quilting would look nice on the back of the quilt. I put on the binding entirely by machine – a first for me, as I’ve always sewed to the front by machine, then slipstitched to the back. It was fun to use one of my decorative stitches and I like the effect! In the end, it wasn’t that much easier than slipstitching by hand, as I had to be SUPER careful to have the edge of the front in line with the stitching line from when I had attached the binding, otherwise it looked messy in the back. And you hens all know how much I dislike a hot mess on the back of my projects!

As I said above, I stitched some leather strips to the quilt as well. I really wanted the overall look to not veer towards super-girly, so I offset the embroidery, silk and polka dots with a more ‘masculine’ color-palette, leather and wool flannel.

I stitched the label on after the whole quilt was assembled rather than stitching to the only one side before quilting or tucking into the binding. I like the casual look of stitching labels through all the layers – I do that when putting labels into a lot of my clothes as well. It’s even better if you use a decorative stitch – of course, one that looks nice from both sides!

{the back}

I really loved the back of the quilt. Almost more than the front! The silver shiny fabric is a wonderful silk/cotton blend (I think it’s 55% silk, 45% cotton, but I might have that backwards) that I got at my local quilt shop. I was a little concerned about working with silk in general in the quilt, and ESPECIALLY on the back, but this fabric is incredibly stable – no running, fraying, getting chewed up by the sewing machine, rippling or showing off giant holes from the needle (unlike some charmeuse’s and dupionis I could name…) I really loved the feel of the silk on the back of the quilt and it really looked awesome quilted!

In order to not have to do too much piecing for the back, I used the silk the long way – that’ just about two yards, so it’s 72” x 44” (more or less) on the right. I bordered the silk with some leftover strips from the front and then pieced together another wider strip of the green and white ‘brocade’ print cotton. I love the strong, simple lines and the fact that they are running vertically, while the quilting (and the piecing in the front) runs horizontally.

I actually needed a bit over two yards length for the back and asked for the wrong length of silk at the quilt shop, so I was about 5” short. I didn’t want to shorten my quilt top that much, so I ‘lengthened’ the large silk piece by adding a little pieced strip to the bottom of the silk before attaching to the narrow strip/cotton part of the backing.

Here’s how I did it: I trimmed a 5” strip of silk from the long side of the silk piece, then I pieced a few of my scraps to one short end and sewed it back onto the bottom of the large silk piece. For the most part it just looks like the silk is longer, but there’s this fun little patchwork piece in the lower right corner – it’s hard to see in the photo above because of the light, but here’s a closeup! You can also (sort of) see how the machine stitched binding looks on the back. A little wonky, but that gives it character, right??

All in all, this was a fun quilt to make. I’m not sure I’ll jump wholeheartedly back into quilting, but I would like a matching throw or two for my living room update. I may make a couple blankie/quilts that look more like the back of this quilt!

{what I learned, tips and resources}

• Quilting. It’s not just for cotton anymore.
• Spray adhesive makes basting a quilt a LOT easer (tutorial)
• Strip quilts are fun to make and not quite as tedious as block varieties (tutorial)
• Cutting binding strips is not difficult (tutorial)
• Machine applied binding: sew to back of quilt, wrap around edge, line up fold with stitchline and secure with decorative stitch. Normally you sew to the front of the quilt, then slipstitch to the back as the neatest side will be the machine stitched (front) side, but when doing by machine you will need to see what you’re doing and the neatest side will be the side you are looking at when you sew down the fold.
• Working with voile, silk and wool in quilts. As you hens know, silk dupioni frays like the dickens as does some wool (like the stuff I was using) and while voile is fairly stable as its tight weave is what makes it so soft, I always consider it ‘delicate’. I considered serging the whole thing and probably would have if I’d had a serger at home (I made the top pre-serger.) Instead I made sure to shorten the stitches a tad to make them extra-strong (I normally sew with a  2.5mm stitch, I went down to 1.8), I trimmed with pinking shears, and pressed to one side. It was not a pretty sight!
• To deal with the quilt during the quilting process. You should start quilting in the middle of the quilt in order to keep everything balanced. When you start in the middle, you’ve got a LOT of quilt to either side to deal with. If you’re doing straight-line quilting like I did, roll both ends in – like a scroll. It rolls into a surprisingly easy to handle shape!
• When doing straight like quilting like I did you have to ‘flip’ the quilt after every line, otherwise you end up with a crooked quilt. So. Start quilting (start in the middle, it’ll be easier). Sew your first straight line, then you will turn the quilt and start quilting on the same side that you just ended on. Like so.

Special thanks to my boss, Nikol, for all her advice during my frantic month of quilting… And to Ashley at Film in the Fridge for the endless inspiration (um, is copying someone’s work directly still considered ‘inspiration’?) and great tutorials!

In closing, a snapshot of some nice hens I met this weekend.

Anniversary Dress (ANOTHER Claire Cami Dress!)

Ahoy there, fishies. Let’s make it a seafaring week, shall we? Today you will be blob fishes. And you are some strange looking mo-fo’s. Moving on.

As promised, here’s another new dress, although if you’ve checked out snugbug365 in the last few days, you got a sneak peek. It’s another version of the Claire Cami Dress!

This one is a tad longer, unintentional, as all you blob fishes know how much I like my dresses scandalously short. The main fabric is from Kate Spain’s Central Park collection (available online) and I was pleasantly surprised at how the super-linear print ended up looking very cabbage rose-like! The contrast fabric is from Tina Given’s Haven’s Edge Collection (‘Climber’ in celery, also available online!) I am quite enamored with how the two fabrics look together, especially close up! The pattern in the contrast fabric is greyish purple!

Topstitching RULES!!

I think I say this every time I review a Kay Whitt design, but I really love how her patterns are so heavy on topstitching and edgestitching. It gives the simple cotton dresses a much more finished feel.

Oh! The facings are in a contrast fabric from the same collection as the main fabric. Sadly, we have sold out of it at the shop.

I particularly like how edgestitching the waist casing looks!

And now… the dark side of topstitching

Can I indulge in my super OCD side for a bit? As much as I love the look of the topstitching, the combo of understitching and topstitching is driving me batty. It’s a HOT MESS on the inside! For this dress, I used the pink thread while understitching – that’s the pink you can see on the facing. I switched the bobbin out from pink to white for the topstitching, which helped a bit, but it still looks like I was doing some crazy-sewing on the facings. I topstitched with the right side up, so I could see what I was doing, so the inside is less, um, tidy. I HATE how the edgestitching weaves around the understitching and even veers into the teeny fold on the inside of the neckline. Sigh. If understitching wasn’t so helpful in getting the neckline to behave, I’d skip it all together, but I suppose it would be silly to sacrifice good construction for the aesthetics of the inside finishing. Although, I often do either understitching OR topstitching, not both.

To make matters worse, I stitched in the ditch to keep the facings under control and didn’t change the bobbin thread to white. I also only stitched in the ditch on the outside. Like I said, hot mess.

It’s still cute from the outside, though!

More details…

{the hem}

{the waist casing}

{the back}

 

Claire Cami showdown…

   

Clearly, there’s a reason I like short skirts!!

The cabana dress (Kwik Sew 3856)

Greetings spotted quolls! You guys freak me out with your cute, catlike looks and carrion-eating ways. I know you’re all like “we have luxurious spotted fur, we don’t need no stinking’ dresses,” but I’m thinking you might be interested in THIS… the cabana dress!

I’m on a maxi dress kick, aren’t I, you adorable spotted meat-eaters, you… first the Tribal Maxi and now this! And guess what… there’s more in the hopper. These are SUPER comfy and fun to wear! I used Kwik Sew 3856 and made it from Anna Maria Horner voile with a bit of contrast voile from our newest line at the shop, Prince Charming from Tula Pink. I’m loving how I laid out the pattern – I didn’t take any photos of it, but the patterns match at the side seams of the skirt for extra awesomeness!

This particular dress is a sample for the shop as I’m teaching it as a class at the end of July. I was super excited when I saw the pattern while flipping through the Kwik Sew catalog… it’s a very easy dress to sew up, it’s super on-trend AND it’s a great dress for all the lovely voiles that we’re getting in the shop!

Speaking of voile, a lot of folks are concerned that these fabrics are too transparent for garments. A reasonable question as the fabric appears to be see-through. I’d like to let you ferocious night hunters know that I’m wearing a black bra AND a white denim skirt under mine (don’t ask, it was a long day) and it barely shows!

Living with a surplice

I’ll address the most difficult design aspect first. The neckline. This dress has a full-on surplice neckline. Does anyone know what a surplice neckline is? Anyone? OK, you in the front row (she’s such a know-it-all) From the website Wise Geek “In fashion, a surplice is a diagonally crossed neckline and/or bodice. It is also thought of as a "faux wrap" style and creates a deep v-shaped neckline. The surplice is a fashionable and very feminine look used for women's clothing, yet, ironically, it was inspired by garments worn by men.”

This type of neckline is a bugaboo for large busted quolls, as it usually is ridiculously revealing. Of course, there’s always the option of wearing the cami underneath for coverage, but I’m not a fan of that look and I feel odd just wearing a tank top under a dress. Like I forgot my pants. I often hand tack the neckline into place right where it crosses and forms a ‘V’. For this dress, I thought I needed to pull out the big guns. I put the dress on, smoothed and carefully pinned the neckline at a more modest point than my belly button. Then I took off the dress, and checked that I hadn’t pinned in any strange wrinkles. Finally, I carefully restitched along the topstitching that was already on the neckline. I’ve darkened my stitchline in the picture below so you can see what I’m talking about.

Here it is from the inside – you can see on the left hand side the floating stitchline from my fix! You can also see all my crazy stitching lines. Grr.

The waistband

The pattern uses a novel method (well, novel to me) of creating the elastic casing at the waist. The seam allowances for most of the dress are 1/4”, but at the waist the instructions are to attach the bodice to the waist with a 5/8” seam then press the seam down and edgestitch so that the seam allowance becomes the casing. I didn’t want the raw edges, so I attached the bodice and skirt with a french seam. I sewed wrong sides together, trimmed the seam allowance to 1/8”, then turned right sides together and pressed. Then I sewed with a 5/8” allowance – I think I might have gone a little deeper than that, actually.

Here’s a photo of the inside of the dress. The french seam is indicated by the pink arrow. The lower line of blue stitching is the edgestitching that forms the casing. the upper line of blue stitching is the second part of my french seam where I sewed with the deep 5/8” seam allowance.

Here’s the view from the right side of the dress.

More finishing!

I used a variety of methods to finish the dress – serging, french seams and, well..Serging and french seams. All of the raw edges are finished very simply according to the pattern instructions. Just overcast the raw edge, turn under 1/4 inch and topstitch. Easy, but somewhat difficult to do on the arms AND the neckline, what with all those curves. The lightweight fabric really wanted to make some nice wrinkles when it got stretched a bit. I stay stitched the neckline and used my new walking foot and managed to get through it!

The hem

I did a few adjustments to the pattern – I added 2” of length to the bodice, 4 inches of width to the skirt and did a 1” FBA. I don’t know if any of these adjustments were all that necessary. I’d already purchased and washed the voile, so when I started to cut I realized that the 2” I’d added to the bodice left me about an eigth of a yard short on the skirt section. Luckily, we’d gotten in some new fabrics that went well with my main fabric, so I added a border section. I just cut about 8” off the bottom of the skirt pattern and cut the contrast fabric from the pattern pieces, adding about 1” to the top (for seam allowances) by eyeballing it while I was cutting. I love the small repetitive print with the swoopy, feathery main fabric! I also love how it is just to the WTF side of matching, color-wise.

The last word – Kwik Sew 3856/3868, The Cabana Dress

fabric: Main fabric: cotton voile from Anna Maria Horner’s Innocent Crush Collection (Slow Dance in Golden, available online); contrast fabric from Tula Pink’s Prince Charming collection (Box Hexagon in Indigo, available online)

pattern: Kwik Sew 3856 (XS – XL), Kwik Sew 3868 (1X – 4X)

notions: thread, interfacing (the sew-in kind!)

time to complete: 30 minutes to adjust pattern, 15 minutes to cut, 30 minutes to sew, 30 minutes to hem, 10 minutes to tack down the surplice neckline

likelihood to make another?: 100% I already have the fabric sitting in my work bag!

curvy girl score – 8 The long skirt is fun to wear and is nice and cool while providing coverage. I really like the empire waistline and the kimono sleeves as well. The neckline is trick for a larger bust but is easy to fix right out of the envelope by pairing with a tank or tacking as I did. Kwik Sew gets double gold stars for releasing a woman’s version going up to 4X (I started with XL and did my adjusting, due to my narrow, wimpy shoulders!)

Bonus picture!

Nikol, my lovely boss and head fabric buyer (aka ‘pusher) made the knee length version out of another of the Tula Pink voiles we got in (available online). Blue is certainly her color, isn’t it??