quarantine projects: Kielo dress

Hey, I'm here! And I made something!

Until this past weekend I hadn't touched my sewing machine in weeks. I had several things cut out and ready to go, but the concept of sewing was stressing me out so. hard. Do you ever have that thing where you stall on a project because you have to change the bobbin thread and you just don't want to? I had that, but with every possible next step I could conceivably take. I spent three full hours arguing with myself yesterday about getting the ironing board out to interface the ties. 

This fabric was a mood booster purchased at the behest of my mother. I spent some time scrolling around different sites trying to find something that felt right (and wasn't also £23 per metre, damn you beautiful Art Gallery jerseys), and eventually came across this at 1st For Fabrics, a company I've never used before. Why this was the one I couldn't tell you. Floral prints on a white background are just not me. I've only bought one once before, and that was entirely because it reminded me of my recently deceased grandmother. That definitely isn't the case here. But I kept looking at it, and I knew it was the right one even though I was deeply confused as to why. 

This is a completely standard Kielo with the short sleeve add-on and a slightly scooped out neckline. I always scoop out the neckline a little when I make the dress with sleeves; for some reason my shoulders look weird if I don't. It's the first one I've made on the overlocker and it took about a third of the usual time. Maxi-length seams sewn with a stretch stitch take FOREVER and I'm not a bit sorry to have left that behind me. I still haven't got my overlocker skills down completely so I basted the neckband in first, which made the whole process of overlocking a curve much less annoying. 

I'm delighted with how this dress turned out. The fact that the fabric is so not what I would usually go for makes the dress feel fresh and interesting to me, despite the fact that I've made this pattern so many times I could do it in my sleep. It's a completely different summer vibe for me and I'm really enjoying it. Also this fabric is perfect for the job - it's still thin and drapey but noticeably more substantial than most viscose jerseys, and miraculously it's still opaque even when stretched over my boobs. I'm wearing a bright red longline bra in these photos and you'd have no idea. 

The one sad thing about this dress is that it's made me confront the reality of my earliest (and still favourite) two iterations of the Kielo. It's so much more obvious now that they're dying. My green version was made from 50p per metre fabric because I fully expected it to be an unsuccessful toile, and I used a finishing method on my stripy one which was nowhere near as successful as I apparently thought at the time. I'm not convinced I knew what the words "bias facing" actually meant. I was all ready to put this pattern away until next year, but now I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to track down similar but better quality fabric and just remake the exact same two dresses again. I'm not prepared to live a life without an emerald green Kielo, dammit!

At the moment I'm not going to make any promises about the next post. When I originally said I'd go back to posting twice a week I had a backlog of things to post and was sewing away enthusiastically, but now I have nothing in reserve and sewing is tough. Hopefully completing this one will get things moving again, but I have no way of knowing right now. So I'll just say that I'll do what I can when I can, and I'll be back as soon as possible. 

How is everybody doing? This is week ten of lockdown for us, which... nyaaargh. We've slowly started reintroducing Zoom socialising into our lives, and thanks to the slightly relaxed lockdown rules I got to stand two metres away from my little brother in a halfway park and chuck a homemade face mask at him. I'm incredibly angry about the way our government is approaching this whole thing and it's absolutely a preamble to a "you all did it wrong, peasants, it's your fault" in a few weeks' time when everything gets worse again, but those two hours of seeing another human face did me a power of good.