For a few years now I’ve kept a practice of making myself a new dress for my birthday. This week as I was finishing up Cobbled Bodice Attempt #5 on a dress by a careless and sloppy designer I both love and hate (Tina Givens, IYKYK), it occurred to me that I should be making myself a new dress to celebrate my Gramma’s birthday instead (or in addition to). My Gramma was a professional sewist, making and altering things for people right up to the day she died. She gave me the skills and the confidence to make my own clothes. She taught me how to read and use a sewing pattern while guiding me through making the most fiddly and ridiculous shirt I’ve ever sewn, with cuffs and buttonholes and an asymetrical closure and an incredible ruffle that ran all the way up the front opening and around the collar. She bought me my first sewing machine, and bequeathed me her last one, which I still use. She would have turned 99 today.
As I should have expected, the bodice fix I was attempting didn’t work out (um hi, it took me five tries to realise it’s not the bodice that’s the problem). That dress is back on the sewing room floor, destined to become a skirt or rags, and I’ll make a whole post about my struggles with Tina Givens and her beautiful yet deeply crappy patterns another day. Fortunately, I had another dress nearly finished so I had something far better and more beautiful to wear today than that utter failure.
Pattern details: like most of what I make, this dress is a pastiche. The mullety two-layer skirt is from the Metamorphic Dress by Sew Liberated (pattern link: Metamorphic Dress). I had at first made this using the same bodice pattern I used for my thesis dresses, an apron-ish style I still love but the shoulder straps of which tend to fall down constantly from my narrow shoulders. I’m working my way slowly through my closet and remaking everything that’s not perfectly comfortable, the majority of which have that irritating strap problem. I adapted this new bodice from the Orchard Dress by Helen’s Closet (pattern link: Orchard Dress). I wore it to the public library knitting club today and the straps didn’t fall off once!
The top layer fabric is pieced together from large flour sack towels that I dyed with tea and screenprinted with all of my favourite motifs: cartoony flowers, clusters of floating arches, twisting segments of warped spacetime, and layers of gritty monoprinting blocked out with paper cutouts. The bottom layer is my old standby, the SCA’s favourite chemise cotton from the Bleachery in Aurora, Illinois, dyed a softly mottled pale olive tan with goldenrod flowers and iron water.
The Captain, whose pose I’m trying to copy here, is wearing my Gramma’s ribbon full of pins won in the Senior Games, along with my Granddad’s steam show hat full of badges.