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.

And..... we have a dress!

Sorry for the quick photo, but by the time I figured out my sailor's tripod, I had to run to work. Here is my Simplicity 8640 dress though. Fabric is two different colors of "Diamond Mine" from Anna Maria Horner's little folks voile, which was soooooooo nice to sew with.



I didn't get a picture of it yet, but my zipper is a rainbow colored riri zipper which I found at Pacific Trim! You can't see it, but I love knowing it's there, and having a metal zipper makes it feel like a real vintage dress. The dress is unlined, so I'll wear it with a slip, and has a neckline facing. The very tip of the point where the bodice and skirt meet was sewn by hand. I got chicken about sewing that intersection on a machine.

This is the first non-muslin dress I've sewn in several months. I forgot what a nice feeling it is to end up with a garment you can wear. Between the light voile and the looser fit, this will be fantastic for the next 90F heatwave we get.

Kate's strawberry shortcake dress

Here's the dress from the fabric that Kate picked out yesterday. She first was attracted to all the sparky fabrics in the prom dress aisle, but I ixnayed those. ;-) So we picked out Strawberry shortcake, and I asked her if she'd like to use some eyelet for the collar, and she agreed. Here we go:



Super girly sleeves!



I know it looks really simple, but for some reason this dress took forever (forever being almost 4 hours)... it was very slow going with the sleeves, the collar, gathering the skirt, attaching the skirt lace, pressing pressing pressing. I hope I'll get a picture of it on her this evening.

work in progress: butterfly dress

Burda 9677 - dress, vest, and coat. At Mood last weekend, I bought a great green embroidered velvet fabric to make holiday dresses for the nieces. Then this weekend I bought this pattern for the vest. The dress has some really nice pleats, though, so I cut it out of a cute butterfly fabric. I've only done the front and back panels so far, the rest will have to wait for a while.