Refashioning and honesty

You may remember I made this a few months ago:

This is a Colette Wren dress that I was in deep denial about. I loved this fabric, loved the idea of it all, was so pleased to have managed to squeeze an entire dress, including sleeves, out of 1.2m of fabric, and I wasn't prepared to entertain the notion that this dress was anything other than a success. Even though it's clearly, clearly not. 

This dress doesn't work. The fabric doesn't want to be doing what I was trying to make it do, the colours don't look good next to my face, this is WAY too much print for me to be wearing all over. The one time I wore it out I felt hideously self-conscious and was actually relieved that the restaurant was cold enough for my boyfriend to insist I wear his jacket. Yet still I wrote the post all "well, it's not as successful as the last one, but once I do a bit of altering I will totally wear it" even though I knew there was nothing I could do to make the thing work the way I wanted it to.

Here is what it looks like now:

It's a miniskirt! I took the top part of the dress off, made an elasticated facing and lopped several inches off the hem. All the weird bits have gone, it's way more versatile, and most importantly I can wear it with a load of black so I don't feel overwhelmed. 

Even having acknowledged that I was never going to wear the dress as it was, I was still stubborn about it. I unpicked the top but refused to cut into the skirt for ages because that would be a waste of material and what was the point in having gone to all that trouble with the layout if I was just going to end up with a miniskirt. It took me nearly a month to get my head round it, I think, and even then I was basically pushed into it by the fear of running out of clothes before the end of Me Made May. I'm really glad I did it, because now I get to wear this fabric and still feel like me in it.

I mentioned in my Me Made May lessons post that I would be trying to write more honestly about the outcomes of my projects, and this is the first step in that direction. The second one will be coming next week, and the photos for that are MUCH worse. So this should be fun, then. 

Me Made May week four

Final collage!

(I am wearing, left to right and top to bottom: Colette Wren skirt; Liberty jersey mash-up top; Gertie cropped sweater and Sew Over It tulip skirt; Cake Patterns Tiramisu dress; self-drafted (ish) silk T-shirt and Sew Over It tulip skirt; By Hand London Anna dress; silk T-shirt and slightly different Sew Over It London tulip skirt; Gertie cropped sweater and patternless miniskirt; Jennifer Lauren Vintage Bronte top and Sew Over It tulip skirt)

Me Made May is finally over, and I'm actually quite sad about it. Much as trying to find something to wear and make myself look presentable enough for a photo stressed me out some days, I found it a super useful and enjoyable exercise and I'm going to miss doing it. I think I'm going to attempt to keep Instagramming makes/outfits a few times a week so I don't forget how to put myself together, and also because I have actual Instagram followers now and I'd like to keep sharing with them.

Week four observations:

1. A large proportion of things I wore here were made in the past two weeks.
2. I suddenly skewed massively vintage - and also massively blue - and I'm not quite sure why.
3. More dresses would have been really helpful.
4. I got way more ruthless and threw several things away before I'd finished making them.
5. Running out of garments meant a LOT more mixing and matching.
6. At the beginning of the month I apportioned some clothes as my "back-up" items and I have worn exactly none of them.
7. I'm genuinely not sure how I'll get dressed now that the challenge restrictions have been lifted.

There is YET ANOTHER post to come with all my long-winded analysis and planning in it, because I'm not ready to let go yet. Hooray for Me Made May, and I hope I'm able to do more challenge things like this.

Me Made May week three

Week three collage:

(I am wearing, top to bottom and left to right: Sew Over It circle skirt; Sewaholic Cambie dress; Sewaholic Cordova jacket (plus barely seen Gertie Sews Vintage Casual cropped sweater underneath); three-pattern mish-mash Liberty top and Sew Over It tulip skirt; By Hand London Elisalex and Butterick 4443 mash-up dress; BONUS Closet Case Files Sallie jumpsuit; Colette Wren dress; Sew Over It wrap dress)

This was the most difficult week so far, and it made me worry about the final week (which is also nine days long, so yay). By mid-week I found myself thinking "oh God, I NEED to make more stuff" even though I had more than enough stuff left, which probably means I need to do some thinking about the other things in my wardrobe. The photo of the black and white Liberty jersey top was taken literally seconds after I finished making it in a rush of relief at having come up with an outfit, which probably isn't a great sign.

I also made the jumpsuit this week. I haven't actually worn it outside yet, but I finished it on Friday evening and was so excited that I had to post it immediately. Blog post coming soon!

Week three observations:

1. This week looked a lot more subdued and although I love my greys and navys and blacks, I'm not sure that's the direction I want to go in.
2. I could really do with some more comfy things, both for loungewear and general wear.
3. Much as I joke about having all the tulip skirts in the world, I've found that I really like wearing skirts and tops and I actually don't have enough of either.
4. I seem to have decided that three items of shop-bought clothing per week is my limit.
5. The handmade stuff that's simple and versatile will get a decent amount of wear even if I'm not really in love with it.
6. I like either "super practical and comfortable" or "I feel pretty fancy dressed like this" and I've not got much time for anything in between.
7. If I knew right from the beginning of the month that I wasn't even going to consider wearing certain things I've made, why do I still have them?

I'm going to do my final nine-item collage on Thursday next week rather than having a stupid little extra one with two pictures, and hopefully won't just consist of pictures of me looking panicked and wearing tops I don't like on my head. This is not entirely outside the realms of possibility.

Creative Sewing: refashioning

I finally took the plunge and hacked up some of my precious me-made clothes. I took some of the dresses that I had never worn (or worn once and felt incredibly uncomfortable in) and turned them into skirts. This would serve the dual purpose of:

1. Allowing me to get some actual wear out of things I spent time and money on
2. Giving me new skirts and thus possibly slowing down the All The Tulip Skirts train

Here are the first two!

Refashion number one: Green Butterick 4443

Original:

Refashion:

I took the top off the dress, drafted a waistband (and by "drafted a waistband" I mean "drew a rectangle"), and inserted a concealed zip. One of the reasons I never wore this dress was that I considered my zip work to be extremely shoddy, so it was good to have a chance to correct it. I still had a ton of leftover fabric from this dress to make a waistband, which I'd meant to get rid of and never bothered. Yay laziness!

I'd forgotten that I was still being overly cautious with my sizing when I made the dress originally, so I'd taken in the side seams quite some way. For the skirt I decided to make two little pleats in the front instead, which I much prefer to my previous technique of "haphazardly taking an inch off the seams at the waist then veering outwards wildly at the hip point".

I'm really glad to get some life into this one, because I love the colour so much (my camera is still refusing to record the actual colour of this material - I swear it's bright emerald green in real life). In dress form it always felt simultaneously too dressed up (because style and colour) and too casual (because bog standard cotton) for any occasion I might want to wear it. It's much less of a problem in skirt form and has already made its way into regular rotation. Success!

Refashion number two: 80s Wren

Original:

Refashion:

Didn't bother changing my top, because a) favourite top and b) lazy. Not ideal for an actual sunny day, I'll admit.

This one was basically always going to end up this way. When I put the skirt together and tried it on (I made the skirt part first because I was worried it would be terrible) I thought "hey, this is a really great skirt. Maybe I should stop here and just have this skirt." There was never going to be room in my life for this kind of pink and black sleeveless thing, particularly not with all the trial-run fit issues in the bust, so it's good to have returned it to a wearable state.

Basically all I did was unpick the top, fold in the raw edges and topstitch under the elastic, and it's now a perfect work/being presentable skirt. Very pleased.

This was a really good project to do. As well as helping me realise that I have the skills to make separates out of any dress I choose, it's also made me a little less pointlessly sentimental about things I make. I am wearing my new green skirt as I type this, which just wouldn't be happening if it was still a dress. I have another refashion currently in the works and will be keeping it in mind for the next time I sort through my less-worn handmade stuff (which is happening more or less on a monthly basis at the moment as I struggle to cut down on the amount of shit I own prior to boxing it all up and transporting it across London).

I'd like to leave you with the most inexplicable photo I took yesterday, where I am apparently rather shocked at what I can see in my own house and also have my head on backwards.

UODPH review

I thought it might be useful for me to look at the things I've made with a couple of months' hindsight. I'm not going to literally review everything I've ever made, because that will get dull, but I'm already grouping some of my makes into batches, right? So to start off with, here are my current thoughts on the products of my Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul.

1. Tiramisu

Indisputable success. This is great, and I've worn it a lot. Literally the only bad thing about it is the itchy stay tape in the shoulder seam.

2. Wren

I have never worn this and I am never going to wear this. But it was a good test run, and my second attempt is one of my favourite dresses ever. If I can persuade myself to take apart something I've made, I'll take the top off this and have it as a skirt.

3. Cambie

Two problems with this dress. It could have done with a full bust adjustment, and it is the stupidest colour ever. I mean, it's a nice colour, but it goes with literally no other colour in the world because it's such an optical illusion. This should be a great work dress, but I don't generally go around with bare arms and there is no colour of cover-up that works with it (though I do wear it to work on a fairly regularly basis with a black jumper). I should make another.

4. Elisalex

I wore this at Christmas, and it's a Christmas dress in my mind now. It's also quite heavy. Again, I should make another. I have a mash-up dress using the Elisalex bodice in the works, and you'll be seeing that fairly soon.

5. Moneta

I like this dress and I wear it fairly regularly, but I don't think it's going to last very long. The fabric isn't great quality and it doesn't have much recovery, so it's actually quite difficult for me to tell what I think of the pattern in and of itself. 

Best: Tiramisu
Worst: This particular Wren dress
Would remake: All five (what, ALL FIVE out at once? If you did the voice in your head, we should be friends), and I've already remade two and a half of them.
Biggest overall problem: Fabric choice

Wren the third

Yeah, I made another one.

This is an amazing thick jersey I picked up in the Sew Over It shop the week before my birthday. I saw it online and kept talking myself out of buying it because finances, so by the time I decided that no, I really did want it, I got the last metre-and-a-bit that they had (they got it in a red colourway shortly afterwards and it's nowhere near as nice).

I didn't have any extra fabric to play with, so I spent ages on the layout. According to the instructions, what I had should have been just about enough for version 1, but I wanted to put sleeves on it as well. I actually did better than I thought I might; I was prepared for this dress to have the short Wren sleeve even though I wanted longer, but I managed to lay it all out with some space underneath the sleeve to extend it. I just tapered down from the pattern piece rather than drafting anything new.

This basically came together as it has before, except the back skirt piece was huge at the waist for some reason. The jersey was too heavy for gathering to work, so I just put in a couple of darts on the back piece.

(The fabric doesn't normally pool like this, it just got hitched up a bit)

It's quite a weighty dress, so it's not especially versatile, but I wore it out to dinner on my birthday. On that first wear I spotted that the neckline gapes when I sit down (this is not a particularly stretchy jersey), so I need to sort that out before I wear it again. I'm also considering making the skirt a bit shorter, but I haven't decided yet.

This dress wasn't as successful as my grey one, partly because the jersey is so thick it almost doesn't behave like jersey at all, and partly because this fabric is amazing but not really me. However, once I sort out the neckline weirdness I think I will still wear it. And even if I don't, I won't regret making the dress. 

(...pretend waitressing? Let's go with pretend waitressing.)

da doo Wren Wren Wren, da doo Wren Wren

(First I made a terrible pun and now that song is stuck in your head. I do apologise.)

In my tea dress post I mentioned that I had to delay making that dress because of unwashed fabric, but since I had the urge to sew something RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT, I made a different dress instead.

Wren, version 1, mark 2. (I made this in December and I realise that it's now February, but I wanted to get all the October projects posted first and taking photos in winter is hard work.)

I liked the shape of my previous Wren, but I'd been wanting to make a long-sleeved (and less 80s) one that I could get more wear out of. I'd bought this charcoal jersey a few months ago, intending to make a Coco Chanel-style knit dress (from that damn Little Black Dress book which left me awash in fabric with no matching pattern when I threw it away), and had reimagined it as a Wren almost as soon as I finished Wren mark 1. I'd been holding off on making it because another blogger had promised to share her fitting adjustments and I thought they might cover the problems I had with my first one. But then she didn't, so I decided to just tackle it myself.

This was my second attempt at a full bust adjustment. For my first one I'd used two step-by-step tutorials working on the exact pattern I was making, one from the pattern's creator and one from a specialist in adjustments for curves. For this one, I used a couple of diagrams from a tutorial working on a pattern that sort of had the same kind of bodice shape maybe if you squint. So it was a bit sloppy.

I should have sized down the bodice before I made the adjustment, but I didn't, so I had to take the shoulders up and the sides in at the end. Also I hadn't touched this jersey for a while and my memory was of it being a lot thicker and less stretchy than it actually was, so I didn't need the ease I'd allowed.

I kept the same larger-sized skirt as in my first Wren, but I took the waist in a bit more, omitted the elastic and took the hem up a couple of inches (well, actually, what I did first of all was sew the skirt on inside out because I am really very smart indeed). The sleeve is the Moneta sleeve - I do have the Wren sleeves but I am still lacking a way to print PDFs, so I assumed that the Moneta sleeve would probably have a similar shape and not cause me too many problems (it did not, it was fine).

(I'm taking a burlesque class at the moment. It remains to be seen whether it will help take the awkward out of some of these photos.)

I've already worn this dress more than anything else I've ever made. I love it. It's comfortable and completely non-restrictive, the wrap front stays in place through a whole night's dancing, and people who also sew haven't realised I've made it, including a dressmaking teacher I was taking a class with. I will definitely be making more, once I find some jersey of a similar weight to this one.

Finally, here's me throwing a hat into the air.

Modelling tips! 

UODPH part two: Wren

I had thought the Colette Wren dress would be one of the later projects from my October haul, probably fourth. I figured I'd want to space my knit fabric and woven fabric projects fairly evenly, and since I already had the fabric for the Tiramisu and had been planning to make a Moneta for longer, the Wren would probably be de-prioritised. Also I still wasn't quite sure about it. (Spoiler: I was not correct to be unsure about it.)

But then I instituted a two-out-one-in rule to help me achieve the goal of all my fabric fitting in its designated cupboard, and while trying to sort through what I had that could be immediately used, I realised I had a remnant of pink ponte knit of the exact dimensions specified for version 1 of the Wren. It seemed like fate; there would be more space in my cupboard, and I could try an initial test run of a) the pattern and b) the company on a piece of fabric I paid £3.99 for. Result.

(Possibly this is my "Result" face)

I settled down to start cutting and immediately hit a snag. When deciding what size to cut, I looked at the finished garment measurements, saw that the pattern was designed to have two to four inches of negative ease at the hips and went HA HA HA NOPE. I am not going to be wearing negative ease on my hips. I'm not saying I will never ever wear negative ease on my hips, but right now that is not a thing that will be happening. So instead of grading out to one size larger in the hips as I would ordinarily do, I graded out two sizes larger. Which is fine, but the 1.5 metres of fabric wasn't enough for that. Luckily I also had a ton of black ponte from the same remnant bin, so I decided to colour block it (also, two fabrics used! One new fabric for me!). Once I'd started cutting it I panicked that a bright pink and black dress would look too 80s for words, and not in a way that would seem deliberate, but eh. It was only a test.

(I cannot explain this pose to you. I'm sorry.)

The first thing I did was sew the skirt up, because that's what I was most worried about. I tried it on and it seemed to fit perfectly. It wasn't the super-fitted "here is my ass" type of skirt that I think they were going for, but for what I wanted, it was great. Going two sizes up in the hips gave me somewhere between zero and a fraction of an inch positive ease, which gives me a nice silhouette without pulling and make me feel self-conscious. I will possibly make myself a carbon copy of the skirt and put some kind of waistband or facing on it, because it seems like the perfect work skirt, for when work is a thing again.

I moved on to the top. "Hem with a twin needle", it said, and I thought, hey, this is just a test one, I could try the twin needle, everyone says it's really easy. If I had to sum up my first evening's attempt in one word, it would be GRAAHHHkcjnbvhruuogb (or something to that effect). My machine ate the fabric, which it hasn't done in months. The threads kept tying themselves in knots, and once one of the threads managed to feed itself directly through the middle of the other thread. I have no idea how. I eventually got the neck edges hemmed, but it took me 40 minutes and about nine or ten complete rethreadings of my machine. I put it to one side, discouraged and disgruntled.

But I would not be defeated. I WOULD finish. I came back to it the next day having read up on how best to tame a twin needle, and I managed to hem both my armholes with only one reset. I was pleased. When I hemmed the skirt, I got it all done in one go and felt extremely accomplished.

BRAIN: We did it! Now for decorative topstitching in bold contrasting colours!
ME: You do know this hemming isn't actually straight, right?
BRAIN: Tra la la...

I have a tiny bit of weirdness around the bust, as you can probably tell from the flashes of bright blue bra you're getting in these photos. I'm not entirely sure how to fix that; I think I need to raise the armscye slightly and possibly even go down a size in the shoulders then try doing one of these full bust adjustment things. Basically, though, I'm really happy - it gave me more grief than I was expecting, but I can see how this would be a fairly easy pattern if you're a bit less useless than me. I think it's super flattering and having gone up the extra size in the hips, really comfortable as well. 

Also, let us stop for a minute and admire my amazing shoes. They are from Miss L Fire and they are bright yellow suede and they are super comfy and I LOVE them. They cost a lot more than I generally spend on shoes (I don't like shoe shopping because I have weird-shaped feet that behave themselves when I'm walking around the shop trying shoes out, but start screaming in agony when I try to wear any shoes I've actually paid for. A lot of money has been wasted this way), but my boyfriend instituted a "when I get my first paycheque from New Job, we're each getting a pair of entirely frivolous shoes" rule. I highly recommend this rule for anyone looking to win at being a boyfriend. Having not really worn yellow anything since I was eight, I'm now convinced it goes with everything. You will be seeing a lot more of these shoes, and you may get sick of them. I, however, will not. YELLOW SHOES.

Anyway, dress. We were talking about a dress.

Boyfriend's assessment at the trying-on stage: "It's not even that 80s. I was expecting much worse from what you said. It's actually just quite a nice dress." Then he noticed that I hadn't sewn the bodice and skirt together yet and starting poking me in the midsection, because our relationship is largely based around being quite childish quite a lot of the time. 

I have plans for a couple more of these - one in this style with long sleeves, and one with a gathered skirt, possibly in the aubergine print jersey I've been hoarding (once I've tested the other skirt out on something, because I am completely terrified of making a mess of that material. I'm not sure why it's such a block, it wasn't even that expensive in the grand scheme of things). I also need to make a cropped jacket to go with this, because it is very much not November attire, even with this weird-ass fake November we have going on at the moment. 

Yay Colette! I'm so glad this worked out, I wanted to like you so much that I think I'd have been a bit upset if the dress hadn't come out well. Next stage: see if the Moneta works as well for me as it seems to have done for every single other person I've seen in one. I have high hopes now.