The Hundred Dresses: Day 30

July 2, 2013 Erin17 Comments

The key to this dress is … keys:

I posted about this one last October, and I’ve worn it tons since the beginning of warm weather this year:

I’m entranced by antique keys lately — and I’m not the only one. (I saw a really interesting dress in the windows of Columbia College weighted down with thirty pounds of keys — PDF here.) This fabric is still available in lots of places … this coral/peach colorway is nice, and this more ditsy/antiquey key print is nice, too.

The zipper here is slightly out of focus, but I think it’s about a B-:

And here’s the back:

This is a fun dress to wear — it feels very summery, and the green is really bright. (Also, it goes nicely with my favorite gray Keds …) When I first made this dress I thought that the dark teal color in the print would make it work for cooler weather, but that really didn’t happen. This is definitely a hot-day dress (for me, at least).

Now that we’re a third of the way through (almost) the hundred dresses — how are people liking this series? Anything you’d like to see more (or less) of? Do you like a lot of the same dress pattern in a row, or would you like me to mix it up more? More detail? Less detail? Please let me know in the comments … and if you’ve read The Hundred Dresses-the-book and have an opinion, please feel free to review it on your favorite bookseller’s site …

The Hundred Dresses: Day 29

July 1, 2013 Erin6 Comments

I do appreciate the irony of these next few photos being slightly out-of-focus:

This is another Vogue 9929, of course, and it’s in that heavy Japanese Echino fabric. I’ve only sewn with it a couple of times but I really like it. It’s easy to sew with and very comfortable to wear. The only downside is that the whites are all more on the “unbleached/ecru” side, so if you need your whites sparkling, Echino may not be the fabric for you. (It looks like a variant on this print is still available, too.)

I bought what seemed like a lot of this fabric quite some time ago, and made a nice-enough pleated skirt out of about half of it. Which left me just slightly under what I needed for this dress, as you can see from the visible sliver of the selvage at this underarm seam:

Here it is close up:

A better example of me going “eh, what the heck, nobody will notice and if they do they’ll surely be polite enough not to say anything” cannot be found. You can also see that there wasn’t enough for self-fabric bias, so I resorted to good ol’ double-fold straight from the package. (Oh and that zipper is about a C+.)

Here’s the back view:

If you went by sheer number of approving comments, this is probably the most popular dress I own. I am regularly stopped on the street and asked about it (which I use as opportunities to evangelize the many many benefits of sewing).

(If you want to see this being worn, I posted about it here. I also have this fabric in green.)

The Hundred Dresses: Day 28

June 30, 2013 Erin10 Comments

This is the last Simplicity 1577 (for a while, not the LAST ONE EVER), but this one? Is my absolute favorite. I never get tired of this dress:

BLACK SEERSUCKER. It’s the best fabric ever. I wish I’d bought all of this there ever was. This collar has a little bit of bad roll to it. (Oh! I tried Kathleen’s super collar instructions and it worked beautifully. Sneak peek picture here.)

The zipper is just, eh. A C:

The pockets and the collar are lined with black batiste — here’s the pocket:

And the collar (you can see the ripples from the seersucker):

And the back view:

I wear this either with black Justin boots or with these European grandma shoes that I searched for FOREVER and finally found on Etsy. (That’s the seller’s picture I pinned.) I wore them a couple of times and then the ancient glue holding the soles together gave up the ghost, so I had to have them resoled. (TOTALLY WORTH IT.) And sometimes I wear this dress with these ancient J. Crew ankle boots for maximum Dickensian glamour.

I wore this dress in Paris way back in 2011 and got stopped on the Champs Élysées by someone who asked me directions … in French. (NB: I do not speak French.) I figure that’s probably the best endorsement this dress could ever get. (I was actually able to give directions … they were asking where the Georges V was, and I’d just passed it and thought, “Oh hey, that’s the Georges V, that I always read about in novels!” I answered with some “straight on thataway” gestures and I think I was understood.)

The Hundred Dresses: Day 27

June 29, 2013 Erin4 Comments

Got a little bit of a late start today … but I bet you know what’s coming: another Simplicity 1577! And it’s a rare solid-fabric example of Erin-sewing, too:

You know how the camera adds ten pounds? Mine adds ten wrinkles.

This zipper is … not great.

Here’s the back:

And, of course, solid fabric means patterned pocket lining! This is Liberty:

I posted this one about a year ago, so if you want to see it on me, well, here you go.

The Hundred Dresses: Day 26

June 28, 2013 Erin8 Comments

Oh so guess what pattern I used to make today’s dress?

Yep, another Simplicity 1577. (That 1577 is still just the pattern number, not the grand total of versions I have made. Yet.)

Here’s a closer look at the bodice:

And in natural light:

This is Liberty Lemonia in the cotton poplin, which I can’t find extant anywhere anymore, although I did find this luscious (and expensive, of course!) silk chiffon version at Truro Fabrics. Has anyone ordered from them before? They have some really yummy stuff … but they don’t ship to the US.

This zipper, again, is no better than a C:

And here’s the back …

I haven’t worn this 1577 as much as it deserves, mostly because I’m always stumped by what shoes to wear with it. These are my favorite, but I don’t really wear heels on a daily (or weekly, or honestly, even monthly) basis any more … Ideally I would find the perfectly-pale-blue Keds to wear with this, but they don’t seem to exist. (Dear Keds, Y U NO have a custom-Keds site? Take that money you’re paying T-Swift and team up with Pantone instead. I would spend all my money there so I could have matching Keds for everything.)

The Hundred Dresses: Day 25

June 27, 2013 Erin9 Comments

Hey, did everyone see the super-nice slideshow Elle.com did of The Hundred Dresses? Check it out!

Here’s another Simplicity 1577 (they keep going, and going …). This one is in Liberty city poplin:

I love this weight of Liberty, I wish they would make MUCH MUCH MORE of it. Here’s a closer view:

It’s a smooth, tight, silky weave, and heavier than Tana lawn. Here, look EVEN CLOSER:

The zipper on this one, though, is a C-. And that’s generous.

Here, you can see where I had to do a little bit of “there, I fixed it!” at the top:

Here’s the back view, for completeness’ sake:

And since y’all were so helpful with my collar question of yesterday (check out this FashionIncubator post), new question: how would you put a fuller skirt on this pattern? I don’t know whether it would be better to Frankenstein a skirt from another pattern, or whether I should suck it up and redraft this skirt (with its PERFECT POCKETS) to be fuller … and if the latter, how? Suggestions welcome!

The Hundred Dresses: Day 24

June 26, 2013 Erin13 Comments

I said there would be a lot of Simplicity 1577s this week, didn’t I? Here’s another one:

It’s from this Yuwa fabric that I bought back in 2009.I probably held on to it for at least two years before it became this dress.

I’m not happy with the collar. I know there’s some kind of undercutting trick you can do to keep this from happening, but I can never seem to find it. Does anyone have a link?

Here’s a fairly fuzzy view of the front:

And the side zip, this is a strong B, I think:

Back view, inadequate pressing:

And closeup back view … I almost got those stripes matched! (Actually, I am pretty sure this was inadvertent.)

I love this dress but man oh man, are those colors hard to match. They’re all slightly off from any cardigans I actually have, so I end up wearing this dress only when it’s warm enough to go sans cardigan. (I do have one beige cardigan that matches, but … eh, beige.)

The scissors print still makes me happy … I’d love to have another scissors-print dress, maybe one with a more scattered layout? Haven’t seen any scissors fabric that I like as much as this, though.

The Hundred Dresses: Day 23

June 25, 2013 Erin15 Comments

I think this was the first Simplicity 1577 I made — I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’m within a reasonable margin of error.

The reason I’m fairly sure that this was the first 1577 is that this fabric is pretty much my “ideal first try for a new pattern” fabric. First off, it’s quilting cotton, so it’s easy to sew and medium weight. Also, with most quilting cottons, if I make the dress within a year or so after buying the fabric and end up *really* screwing up, I can generally buy more on Etsy or Ebay, even if the stores are sold out.

Also, it’s really busy, so any weird seam bobbles or fitting issues tend to get lost in the print. And if I end up having to do some repairs, as I did here, they blend in a little better, too:

The perfect fabric for a “wearable muslin” is something where, if the dress is a success, I will be happy to wear it, but if it ends up in a tear-stained wad on the sewing room floor, I’m not inconsolable.
Occasionally I try out two new things at once with a new pattern, like this pocket piping — it’s called the “What the Hell Effect“: I’m already trying something new, what the hell, let’s try two things!

I would say my wearable muslins have about a 60-70% success rate, in terms of ending up with a wearable garment. My “I’m just going to jump right in with some fabric that I really love and see what happens” first tries have about a 40-50% success rate. So I do try to make up a new pattern in a less-dear fabric first. Ideally, it’s a fabric I like, but that I bought for $1/yard and have ten yards of … that’s perfect, since I can get two or three muslins out of something like that.

This one turned out to be really wearable — I’ve worn it a LOT.

Do you have a “wearable muslin” strategy?

The Hundred Dresses: Day 22

June 24, 2013 Erin9 Comments

This is one of my very favorite dresses, in that it’s a very cheerful dress to wear. I mean, how could it not be, it’s covered in bicycles!

Here’s a better view of the fabric (Michael Miller It’s A Boy Thing Bicycles) which, by the way, is still available in several colors:

I have no idea why “It’s A Boy Thing,” but I do know that when I wear this dress while actually riding a bicycle, I get lots of friendly waves from little kids. (And if you do not wave back to small children who wave at you when you are riding a bicycle, well, that’s between you and your total lack of joie de vivre.)

The zipper on this one is a strong B:

And the back:

This is another Simplicity 1577, of course, and I hope you’re not tired of these yet as there’s a whole bunch more a’comin. I didn’t remember until I started sorting out dresses for photographing 1) how many of these I’ve made and 2) how nicely it works in quilting cotton. There may be some stashbusting sewing coming up, now that this has been brought forcefully to mind.

The Hundred Dresses: Day 21

June 23, 2013 Erin9 Comments

Have you all picked up yet on the fact that I will basically make the same pattern over and over again until we both drop from exhaustion? Here is another Simplicity 5723, which needs a bit more pressing than it got:

This is in a nice slightly-heavier-than-usual shirting stripe. I had really high hopes for this fabric, and then this happened:

No matter what I tried, I just could not get those stripes to match up. I probably took it apart four or five times. I may take it apart one more time and use some fabric tape to stave off presser-foot creep, which is what I’m blaming for the mismatch. (Well, presser foot creep and my slightly off cutting out.)

The zipper is a C:

I have no idea why I had any navy bias binding at all. My guess is that I bought it in a big lot at a yard sale:

And what happened here? Your guess is as good as mine:

This is my favorite part of this dress … I really like the chevron effect:

I’m not sure where I bought this … it might have been on the remnant table at Britex. It has that slick expensive-Italian-cotton feel. (And hey, when did Britex start selling online? Ooooooh! And like I NEED more places to buy fabric online … )

	usernamealreadyexsis… on Today’s Pattern Story: B…
	exactlycolorful8f484… on Today’s Pattern Story: B…
	michellegienow2016 on Today’s Pattern Story: B…
	Mary on Today’s Pattern Story: B…
	Alisa on Today’s Pattern Story: V…

A Dress A Day

A dress, nearly every day.

Category: 100Dresses