I’ve made a new dress! Every year, my group of lovely friends gives me a gift voucher to Fabulous Fabrics for my birthday… basically my ideal pressie, and I get to go in and choose something yummy… this year I chose this utterly divine silk charmeuse printed with an unusual fractured design. It almost looks like a watercolour/hazy kinda of an abstract , that has been cut and laid in random, uneven ribbons across a pearly ivory ground and then printed like that. You can’t really “see” much of anything in the print when looked at as a whole, but if you look closely you can see areas which look like the topstitching on old levi’s, and a brown leather belt with a brass buckle… you’d never think of it to look at it!
I used Vogue 1351, and managed to eke out of my voucher allowance a length of ivory silk habotai to line it… this is so divine to wear against the skin! so it’s worth it for a slithery slippery little number like this.
… I showed off the lining briefly in my action video below… in which I am obviously totally upstaged by my little production assistant, and honestly I’m not in the habit of lifting up the dress to show off ma underpinnings generally, but I know sewing peeps would understand. Apologies for the crashingly bad quality btw, I’m still learning how to do these videos! editing is kinda tricky and I’m still in the stage where it’s super lucky if I get any clips in there at all, let alone in the right order, and well, forget about continuity. Hopefully I’ll get better at this over time!
I left in the turning off the camera bit at the end too, just because during editing I realised it showed off the cowl neck quite nicely and you can see how the bodice lining doesn’t flip out at all, but sits hugging your torso quite securely and nicely. One of the things about a cowl neck is how they can be too exposing if not done well, and I have a few of these in my own wardrobe that I need to be really careful with! but this pattern is not one of them. The cowl is supported beautifully by the lining in a very modest way. It’s one of my favourite patterns for this reason… this is my fourth time making the pattern, my previous versions are here, here and here. I still wear all of them pretty frequently, except for the green wool one, which came to a heartbreakingly tragic early demise thanks to a too hot wash cycle. I could have cried when I pulled out this mangled, felted little thing from the depths of the washing machine. We were still in the honeymoon phase and I was so excited to think I’d be wearing it a million times yet. *sigh* A moment’s silence please…
And a couple of commenters mentioned after my previous video, and thanks for the positive response! I’m so pleased it’s a feature that people might like! anyway, a few wanted to see more, particularly what things look like when you sit down, so I dashed out to quickly film and tack on an extra bit with that too, which also happens to show off the dress closure by invisible zip in the left hand side seam. I really like dresses that close in this way, much easier to do up than a centre back zip and makes for a nice seamless look.
Details:
Dress; Vogue 1351, silk charmeuse lined with silk habotai
Shoes, in the video; Pedro Miralles
So, a few months ago, I was contacted by Nadja, of 
