There's layers to this shit player, Tiramisu, Tiramisu

(Sorry. I haven't even heard that song all the way through, but it gets lodged in my head every time I've worn or looked at one of my Tiramisu dresses in the past year or so.)

I haven't made a Tiramisu dress since early last year, and given how often I wear my spotty one I'm not quite sure why. I think it might have something to do with finding out more about the company after I made my second version; the way that indie companies operate and market themselves means that I'm much more reluctant to make a pattern when the company and/or its figurehead is behaving unprofessionally, even if I already own and like the pattern. (See: why I have never made a second Moneta.) But I had some fabric that gave me an idea, so I broke it out again.

I got this fabric at Walthamstow Market for a whopping £1.10 per metre. There were two of these huge panel prints in every metre, and also a lot of plain navy space, so I wanted to make a dress with pattern on the skirt and nowhere else. I got two metres, cut it out on the single layer and had two of the panel prints left over. It's amazing how much fabric you start saving when you ignore the cutting layouts.

This fits more like my first Tiramisu than my second, which is a shame because I much prefer the fit of the second one. As I was writing my notes for this post I remembered that I went down a size for the second one, but I must have not altered the pattern to match. It won't stop me wearing this one, but it will motivate me to alter my pattern now.

I did change a few things on this one. I eliminated the centre front and centre back seams so I didn't have to cut the print in half, I used the neck and arm bindings as facings instead because I'm really not hugely keen on the look of the bands, and I stitched both the bands and the hem down by hand. That's not something I would normally do with a jersey dress, but I spent most of last week back with my parents preparing for my grandmother's funeral and I wanted to have something practical and uncomplicated to keep me busy in between flower logistics and eulogy writing and all the usual funeral things. Having been somewhat stressed by all this, the stitching is probably not my best work, but from where I'm sitting it falls squarely into the category of "Fuck it, that'll do" and I have absolutely no interest in redoing it. Unless it falls apart, which I suppose isn't out of the question.

There will probably be more Tiramisus, though I don't have any particular plans for another one. Part of me would like to give it a go in the striped fabric it's designed for, but I'm not bouncing around with enthusiasm to create and wear a stripy Tiramisu of my very own. I did just buy some ridiculous black and white striped jersey where the stripes go all over the place and change thickness and stop randomly and become something else, and I briefly considered using that; putting on a wide-eyed innocent face and saying "I used stripes, just like it said" to see if anyone would come out of the woodwork and explain to me that I'd done it wrong. Ultimately, though, I think it would just hurt my eyes, so I'll use it for something simpler.

I'm hoping to have a really productive week of sewing, but this does depend on the bundle of haberdashery and patterns I ordered actually turning up (I've never had this problem before, and I'm a bit grumpy about it). If it doesn't, I might just wrap myself in all the fabric I've acquired recently and stomp up and down the flat proclaiming myself to be immensely talented and the height of style. It would make for a different sort of blog post, anyway.