The Berry picking dress

Smart doggy. She can tell there's a loooong story coming up about the making of another dress. So here it is. Remember this dress? A few days after I finished it I was picking strawberries and got all tangled up in some bushes. Note to self: think again before wearing chiffon while gardening.

 I'm not much into dungarees or overalls so I decided to go for a sturdy remake of the dress and wear the chiffon one only on ladylike occasions. Since most of the fruits we're growing in our kitchen garden are red, making a red cotton dress seemed like the most sensible choice. Not that I can spill red currants or raspberries totally unnoticed, but it never hurts to pick a  forgiving colour and busy print for garden jobs.

We had an extraordinary summer, so there was very relaxed hand basting in the sun. I shortened the skirt by six inches and changed the front neckline to a deep v-neck. The dress was fully lined and I hemmed the skirts with contrasting bias tape.

 I made the red bias tape for the lining following the continous bias tape tutorial on the Colette Patterns blog.

The hems were seamed by hand on yet another sunny day in the garden.

The finished hems.

Inside out.

Photobomb!

Someday I will find that tripod....

The Joi dress

The Anna dress is slowly progressing, but there's not much to show yet. So I might as well post a dress I made earlier this summer. The pattern is from the Dutch sewing magazine Knipmode.

Knipmode 4/2013-8

Since my fabric, a flowery chiffon, was very sheer I decided to underline the bodice with black cotton poplin. I handbasted the two layers together which resulted in opaque and stabilized pieces. Lauren wrote a very educational post about the why and how of underlining.

For the skirt I wanted to preserve the drape of the chiffon, so I finished fabric and lining separately with french seams. To my surprise the pattern did not use facings for either the front scoop neck or the deep v-neck in the back. I prefer my necklines to keep their shape, so I drafted facings and added a light fusible interfacing. I used satin tape to sew the facing to the lining. Just for the fun of it.

I handpicked my zipper, a tutorial can be found here.

When it came to hemming chiffon I had absolutely no clue about the best way to deal with it. Google to the rescue. Google came up with a YouTube video of a very brave lady, hemming an intricate bridesmaid dress by using a candle. A burning candle. What the....? Call the fire brigade in order to rescue my french seams and handpicked zipper? Never! After some more surfing the interwebs I decided to stitch once, cut off the seam allowance and roll over again. It took some time to finish that tiny hem in the sheer and slippery fabric but I preferred the look over the curled edges that were the result of the scary burning process.

Hemming the lining skirt was much quicker  could have been a quicker job but I decided to go a little overboard for the sake of prettiness. I finished the hem with some black lace.

 Black on black, on the inside, mmm. Oh, well. Did I mention going a little overboard?

 Yo! Can you blame me for flashing my skirt when I get into my car?

The finished dress, with the scoop neck in the front:

And the deep v-neck at the back: