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The Sew Flow

Self sewn: mask, dress and bag
Jacket: Secondhand Levi's
Shoes: Coclico

     I guess this is just a sewing blog for the moment. Over the last few months I have thrown myself into sewing. Partially because I was still mostly living that indoor lifestyle, between Covid and the harsh summer heat here. The other part is that I have fallen in love with it. It is meditative, creative and fun. 
     In the image at the top, I sewed the mask, the dress and the bag and was pretty pleased with myself at how the outfit came together. Below are some of the inspiration photos for the dress. One is an image I saw online somewhere and the other was the window display at Carolina Herrera. I made my dress out of quilting cotton and when I saw that rich blue color I knew it would be prefect. I used the McCalls pattern M7948 as my base pattern, in View C and added pockets. I also left out the small opening in the back of the neck because it could slide over my head without it. This wasn't my first attempt at this dress (I first sewed it in the fabric that I also used to make the mask above) and in the next version I'm thinking of adding a fourth tier, but not necessarily making it longer. I particularly love the billowly silhouette and think the dress is best in motion. I don't have any great photos where I'm not standing still but I'm determined to get an "action" shot of it. 



    The bag is from the Full Moon Bag pattern from All Well in the small size, which you can get for free if you sign up for their newsletter. I found this through a instagram sewing hashtag deep dive and thought it was so cute. I found the instructions to be nice and clear although I struggled a little bit with the thickness of all the bag layers and I discovered that sewing a nice clean circle is harder than I imagined. I used a canvas I got in the 50% clearance section of JoAnn's and then also did a lining (image below) so by the time I was binding the inside edges the machine had to go through quite a few layers. I switched to a needle for sewing denim and hand cranked it over the thickest parts, to be extra careful and keep from damaging anything. The binding of the edges really elevates the look because those edges (mine especially) are very messy, and then you basically sweep them under the sewing rug and boom - it looks legit.
The inside.
     I also made this dress, which I am actually not crazy about and I think to the extent it looks ok it is solely because the fabric is amazing. It has the coolest embroidery on it as well as a beautiful pink ombre and I bought about 5 meters, knowing I wanted to do something flow-y with it. However, the fabric, while beautiful, is too soft and unstructured and so it didn't puff up at all the way I thought it would. There is no shape to it so it just falls flat. This was my bad and it was a poor fabric-dress pairing for what I imagined. I'm not sure if I want to try and turn the skirt into something else (since there are at least 2.5 meters of fabric in the skirt alone) or just leave it alone and come back and see if my opinion changes. No pattern for this one, just two giant rectangles joined for the skirt and a rectangle bodice with two darts. 
Here is a closeup of the emboidery - it is a repeating diamond pattern - can you see it?
Me trying to create artificial volume.
     That's my update from the sew box (which is what I call it when I'm just deep in that sew flow). Hope you're doing well and thanks for stopping by!

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