Olá!
Soooo, I mentioned my brother’s BIG birthday? well to go with it he had a BIG birthday bash! with a Brazilian theme. I stupidly procrastinated about my costume, ended up going shopping for fabric the day before the party and had to cut n’ sew like a madman to get it done on time. #sewingmachineonfullblast
I’d first googled “Brazilian women” and what came up was nothing but women in bikinis. NO. Even if this were the very height of summer… still no. So then I googled Brazil women’s national costume, and oh yes, that’s more like it!
These lovely ladies are wearing the traditional dress for Bahian women, and I thought the white lace and broderie anglaise tops and headscarves and full, brightly coloured skirts so very lovely. So I set about making something like that…
For simple yet voluminous skirt that you can whip up quickly, you can’t go past a circle skirt… I bought 4m of red polyester taffeta from the $4 table at Spotlight… it is very stiff and very silk dupion like and I knew it would stick out nicely with a good amount of volume. I cut out my circle skirt and divided the remainder to make a waist sash and a scarf for part of my headgear. The skirt is a full 2m in diameter, and I thought about making it rush rush rush but nah. I just can’t do that sort of thing, even in a costume. So it’s got a proper interfaced waistband, and closes with an invisible zip and a press stud in the waistband. Hehe, while I was making my costume, Tim sent around a snapchat re it being National Doughnut Day, and I was like HA! I’m fitting right in! This is MY kind of doughnut!!
Oh, I have a little tip! I usually hand-slipstich the ends of my invisible zips to the seam allowance with a few quick stitches, but lately I’ve taken to just doing a few quick back-and-forths on the sewing machine. It’s so much quicker since you’re not having to thread a needle, and actually more stable too.
Speaking of rush rush, I admit I did not hem that giant circle skirt… it’s just overlocked along the edge there! I figure that if/when I ever decide to wear it “for realz” then I’ll go to the effort and hem it properly. Probably seems funny that I did the waistband properly when it’s not even “seen” in my costume, whereas the hem, which is fully visible, I didn’t finish properly… but you know, some things are easy to re-do later and some are not. The waistband is the kind of a thing you’ve got to do it right the first time.
The blouse is made from an old lace curtain that was originally had hanging in an upstairs window… I took it down when we re-did our floors up there and have just never hung it up again! Lazy? the view was too nice? Both really 😉 A bit off one end was sacrificed for my top, hehehe. I had also bought a length of white cotton/linen for the lining, there’s quite a few bolts of this in Spotlight at the mo’ selling for very cheap; I’ve actually bought quite a lot of it lately, for other projects yet to appear here…
My pattern is very loosely the epaulette top from She Has a Mannish style, cut to flare out more in the body and sleeves… the lining is cut straighter in the sides. The shell and lining have separate side seams, but are sewn together at the shoulders and armscye. I pinned and stitched a square neckline, cut and overlocked the edge, and then stitched a length of white cotton bobbin lace around to edge it, part of a large stash that I’ve had for many, many (many, many) years. It’s funny, I kind of threw this together just for the costume, but you know what?? I actually love it and will definitely be wearing this again, in real life!
Waist sash: 22cm x 3.8m, I wrapped it twice around my waist and finished off with a giant pouffy bow. Head scarf: 30cm x 2.4m of white, 21cm x 2.3m of the red; I’d cut the white wider to be the main colour with the red to be more of an accent, like how the Bahian ladies that had popped up in my google search have their headscarves. I’d also googled “how to tie a Brazilian head scarf” and found this video which was sooooorta helpful, I kind of based mine off her first example… but my scarf is much much longer and I obviously tied and tucked and folded extra knots in mine so as to be a much higher and more complicated affair… I’d also made two “ropes” of the white and red and twisted them to tie around my headscarf to help keep it in place.
after this photo, I redid my headscarf and I think it was a lot better the second time! but didn’t have enough time to take another pic 🙁
For footwear, I’d noticed that the ladies tend to wear low, flat, open sandals; very comfortable things like birkenstocks but not anything specific. I got out a few of my sandals, and Mum voted for my little white sandals, that I made last summer. I danced the night away in these things, and they’re still holding up great!
So that’s it! We had a blast… I wish I could show you a picture of my son Tim, who went as Gisele Bündchen in a blonde wig, bikini top, boy leg shorts and full on wings a la Victoria’s Secret. And clonking boots on his feet. It was hilarious. Absolutely he was the belle of the ball!
just use your imagination…
Another funny little moment of the evening’s preparations… Craig used this picture as
his costume inspiration… we’d bought red, blue, green and yellow feather boas from Spotlight to customise the black pants and black shirt that he already had in his wardrobe.. we also bought yellow satin for a sash and a yellow velour fedora from Spotlight too…
Well, he’d cut and tied together lengths of the feather boas to make the leg and arm bands… and there was like masses of feather fluff and debris all over the floor. So he’d got out the vacuum cleaner to do a quick tidy up. Well, he was vacuuming quite perilously close to the little pile of carefully tied together feather boa bands… and I was literally just about to say “you might want to move those feather things” when FWOOOOOOOP! this quite long string of feather boas just disappeared! right up the vacuum cleaner in a flash!! Like, literally a split second and they were gone, like a garishly coloured, feathery snake zooming at top speed into a burrow, … well, Kelly and I burst out laughing and just couldn’t stop, haven’t seen anything so funny in aaaages! Panic! Don’t worry, we opened up the vacuum cleaner and rescued the furry beast from its lair, I mean, the feather boa, fortunately none the worse for wear.
SO much fun. EEEEE, I LOVE costume parties!!
Pattern; the Sudley by Megan Nielsen patterns, I gathered up the sleeve hems with skinny elastic, like I had done for 
O hey!
A jeans-to-jean-jacket project has been a long-term “thing” in my little bucket list of refashions that I have in my head. and one of the reasons I’ve been collecting my children’s old jeans for only like, forever… recently I was asked to speak at the 20th anniversary celebrations of Australian Sewing Guild, a huge honour! and in the general chit-chat heard mention of their 
While I lurve a patchy aesthetic to my clothing, and of course the beauty of a thing like a jean jacket is that it’s supposed to look a bit beat up and NOT a work of beautifully tailored perfection… I still wanted it to look at least a little bit intentional and not too bunged together. There was plenty of colour variation even within each single pair of jeans as well as fashionable distressing effects everywhere too, so I carefully cut so as to make sure the colour variations were matched symmetrically all over the jacket, for example; the upper arms are cut from the same area of one pair, the side fronts also both from the same area of another pair, ditto the two side backs, etc etc, so as much as I possibly could the lighter blue areas are balanced out nicely and symmetrically with the darker blue areas on the jacket.
Thoughts on the pattern: description says a classic, unlined, button-down denim jacket with collar; short and loose-fitting design with flap pockets at the front; sleeve vents and wide button cuffs, wide band at the hem. Well, hmmm, I’m not going to start ranting about my pet hate; the incorrect use of the term “button-down”. Noooo, I’m not. Apart from that! everything else about the pattern is pretty awesome. A slight negative; it is a bit more loose-fitting than I anticipated. Not 80’s loose, but still pretty loose. I’m ok with it really… I will certainly wear it anyway! it’s so comfy and feels absolutely fantastic on! plus I’m only wearing it over a thin little Tshirt here and of course a bit of oversizedness is a good thing when I’ll want to wear it over cardigans or long-sleeved woolly tops in the winter. I think when I get a little time I might have a go at re-jigging the pattern to be a little more form-fitting, for the future. I still have plenty of pairs of jeans that need refashioning, so a second, differently styled jean jacket might even happen. One which even has bigger and better functioning hip pockets!
Now, remember how I mentioned pretty recently that I was looking out for this pattern?? Well, Evie, of 
Please note; I did receive this pattern gratis, however there are no affiliate links in this post. I will always notify my readers if there is an affiliate link in my posts. Also on a tangential yet related note, I read somewhere that people think bloggers are raking in the money through affiliate links, well! that may be true for some types of bloggers, like maybe fashion bloggers? but sewing bloggers… NO.
I used a contrasting white thread here because I found you could barely make out a single thing in my pictures with the matching thread! anyway:
Trim away the raw edge as close to the 2nd stitching as you can.
This is actually the second Sudley I have made. I also made a dress that has now been assigned to Cassie when I realised it was just going to be a little too, er, young for me. I expect it’ll show up on ye olde blog here sometime…
I also cut the lower hemline to have a curved “shirttail” line to it. The hems and the neckline are all finished by hand, because I really wanted to have a smooth clean stitch-free expanse of fabric with absolutely no visible topstitching anywhere. This is about as invisible as I could get.
e to, otherwise… what would I link to?? *horrified gasp* O, the shame of having nothing to link to!
The design is beautifully breezy and very comfortably roomy… I love the cute little cut-on sleeves with a simple cuff, the petite collar has prettily feminine proportions, and the exaggerated lower hemline looks quite dramatic and really cool, imo. That one big box pleat in the back is fabulous, and a pretty dramatic feature too, yes? love how the folds balloon out and down to that gently shaped back hemline. In fact I love all the features and the shape of the dress, full stop. It’s like the perfect little summer shirt-dress. I’m going to wear this one a tonne, for sure, and and probably going to make a tonne more too!
