Tag: Echino

The Hundred Dresses: Day 29

Erin6 Comments

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

Echino glasses Vogue 9929 front

Echino glasses 9929 bodice

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:

Echino glasses Vogue 9929 zipper

Here it is close up:

Untitled

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:

Untitled

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 2

Erin24 Comments

Well, one day down in the hundred dresses for The Hundred Dresses march! Does anyone else have “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” stuck in their heads? Just me?

This dress had a sneak preview back in February, both as background in a sewing-room shot, and as a pocket view — it’s an Echino fabric 9929:
Echino garden 9929 front view

 

Here are a couple more close-up views of the bodice:
Echino garden 9929 bodice view 2

and the binding:
Echino garden 9929 binding view

and the border on the skirt:

Echino garden 9929 skirt border

And the side zip, which needs a little bit of repair already — I didn’t backstitch enough above the zipper, and it’s coming undone. That stretch of seam above the zipper is always a big stress point in my dresses. I’m never sure whether to reinforce it, or start the zipper higher, or what. Suggestions?

Echino garden 9929 side zip view

And the pocket:
Echino garden 9929 pocket lining view

And the back:

Echino garden 9929 back view

 

I’ve worn this a couple of times, and it’s a gratifying experience. Some of my dresses have something I privately call the LGG factor, where LGG stands for “little girl glee”. Basically, a high-LGG dress is one that gets waves and compliments from the under-eight set, and this is definitely a high-LGG dress.  (I would also call this a “Garden Party” dress, one of the hundred dress types in the book …)

Weirdly, although there are so many colors in this dress, I have trouble cardigan-matching it. Nothing I have is exactly that turquoise in the birds’ wings, which is the color I’d like to match … so I default to the bright pink.