Passport Dress - Simplicity 2209

I was so excited when the new Lisette patterns by the same designer as Oliver + S were announced last week that I bought two of them, and I made up a muslin of one today. :-) I picked the Passport dress, which has some very neat darts and tucks and a classic shape to it.



There's a Lisette blog which has a post which explains the dress and jacket in this pattern. I thought the dress darts were really neat looking, but I was wondering how difficult they would be to sew. Here's the bodice front pattern piece:



They are actually quite simple to sew, it turns out. I had to make two alterations to the bodice to fit a little better:



The overlapping from the armhole is a quick and dirty proto-SBA, since the muslin was kind of poofy in my upper chest area. Otherwise, it fit quite nicely. I'll be making this up in a purplish linen blend from the Valori Wells Jenaveve line.



My raincoat is mostly finished, although I'm likely to go in & add the waist drawstring to shape it. It fits OK, but it would be good to have a little shaping in there. And, of course, it needs me to go into the city with it at some point to have buttonholes made up for it.

Spring Showers

J. Crew had a cute little rain jacket in their spring catalog this year. I certainly have a ton of raincoats (I did live in Seattle for many years (; ), but they're all of the patagonia/REI hiking type, and I feel kind of underdressed in them out here sometimes. Here's the J.Crew coat - it's a bit fancier than most raincoats.



I posted on artisan's square last month asking if anyone could remember seeing a BWOF pattern that was similar, and a few hours later I had my pattern! BWOF 01-2009-123.



Yesterday I decided to visit BJ in the garment district for some nice raincoating material, and I bought 3 yards of absolutely gorgeous eggplant colored waterproof cotton raincoating. It's a dream to sew, presses really nicely, and although it was crazy expensive ($20/yard) it's still half the price of buying the J. Crew coat, so I feel like I'm coming out ahead here. ;)

Here's the muslin I had sewn up earlier today:




I have the coat mostly finished except for the front bands, the hem, and the sleeves. I ended up leaving it unlined, since the fabric doesn't fray at all. I did insert a back stay, though. It's flannel with horsehair canvas fused to it.





Instead of upper & lower pockets my version has the lower pockets and then on-seam pockets for my hands directly behind them. At the moment I'm leaving off the waist drawstring, and I instead narrowed the back and side seams a smidge.


I went through my button collection and picked out a few botton options, then showed them to the sailor, who had been amusedly following the "let's make a raincoat" adventure all day. What, normal people don't just up & decide to knock off designer rainwear over a weekend? ;) Anyway, he liked a set of navy blue & gold anchor buttons that I had. Of course. I don't have quite enough of them, so I'll have to hit up Pacific Trim to get a few more.

Perhaps I'll actually finish this up before the torrential March downpours start up!