Sew, I've Been Thinking ...

Making this dress was a spur of the moment thing.  I had pulled this fabric out of stash late last year with a view to including it in my Shetland Collection, but I didn't know what to do with it.  It's a silver grey sateen I bought many years ago for a long forgotten SWAP.  Needless to say, it never got used. It's been sitting in a pile since then and last week I decided to make a dress out of it. To make things easy, I chose a pattern I've already fitted to me/   This is Vogue 8787  and I've made this once before a couple of years ago in black velvet.  I thought the grey looked a little bland on its own so I decided to pipe the waistband with black satin piping.    I trawled my stash and found this funky poly satin leftover from lining a red skirt and jacket made at about the same time as the original version of this dress.     So where's the SWAP, you may well ask?  I had so much of this fabric left that I c...

I seem to have given up on my SWAP sewing because this weeks garments don't go with anything I've sewn so far.  In dredging through my sewing room the other day I came across an inspiration picture I ripped out of a magazine a couple of years ago.  The spots on the original dress were bigger but I had fabric in my stash and a pattern that approximated the one in the picture and I was in the mood for combining the two, so this jumped to the head of the queue. The dress is M6699 which is apparently now OOP.  I made this dress the Christmas before last out of a retro Christmas print (and never blogged) and it just needed a little tuck taken in the neckline as the shoulders were a little wide for me and I left off the pockets and silly contrast on the vent, but otherwise I made it as per the pattern.  I cut a 10 on top graded to a 12 at the hips.  McCalls aren't a great fit for my shape, but this works out OK. I lined this with whatever I...