HELLO! Twice in the one week, what? That's not like me, eh? But, the dinner is cooking and I got a few photos today of a recently-finished dress and I thought, why not. I'll be a badass this week.
Anyway - no craic with me. I have been working at home this week, writing and monitoring a project that is nearly finished. It's hardly been thrilling, if I'm totally honest. Still - it's better than being out of my head with work stress, but it'd be nice if it wasn't all or nothing. I haven't been sewing this week, although I did have a little surge of productivity at the end of last week, when I had one of those things where inspiration struck and nothing would do only I had to make what was in my head STRAIGHT AWAY. So I did!
I've been looking for another great maxi dress pattern. I'm still not totally convinced by Simplicity 1801, although I like the idea of it, so I had temporarily called off the search. Anyway, as I was putting on a handmade dress - the Stone Flower dress - one morning last week, I was hit with inspiration. What if I just took a skirt pattern I liked, and lengthened it to a maxi? So that's what I did...
Instant Street dress - By Hand London Kim dress bodice and lengthened skirt from Deer and Doe Belladone dress
More star-print wax cotton! You've seen this before in the shape of the Bedelia dress and the Thelma dress but I liked it so much that I bought some more of it on eBay. I actually bought this with the intention of making a shirt-dress out of it - which I may yet do as I have lots of it left over - but this dress kind of barged into the queue.
Having already paired the Kim bodice and the Belladone skirt, all I needed to figure out how to do was lengthen the skirt to maxi length. Now, I'm sure there's a proper, pattern-cutting way to do this, but here's what I did. I pinned the skirt pieces to the fabric and simply drew a line, continuing the side-seam line down to the length I wanted the skirt. There was some method to my lazy way of doing this, in that I wanted the skirt to be pretty flared, and I didn't mind the hem on the maxi dress being wider than that of the original skirt pattern.
I decided to hem the dress so that I could wear it with lower heels or with flats - but I am tempted to make another one with a few inches added to the hem so it can be worn with heels. I'm really pleased with how the dress has turned out and how the silhouettes work together. I think my maxi-fied Belladone skirt might work well with other bodices too... I can see it with a sleeveless Emery bodice or Elisalex bodice too!
I wore this today as it's really good to have comfortable but pretty clothes for working from home. It cheers me up! Nic was at home today too so we went out for a walk at lunchtime and again after work. It's really muggy here at the moment and I felt cool and serene in my dress. Okay, no, not serene. My hayfever has been really bad and the anti-histamines mess with my head, so actually I've been feeling pretty spaced out. At least I looked nice, eh? And, even though I can't see it, I was happy to know that my *white* invisible zip was actually invisible:
HO YEAH. Wrinkles c/o the sofa.
One of the features I really like in the Belladone skirt is the slash pockets on the hips. I wasn't sure if these would still work on a maxi skirt, but I think they do. Also it's handy to have somewhere to stash my tissues as I'm basically sneezing constantly right now:
POCKET ACTION SHOT
That's the craic with this dress. I took an admittedly low-risk gamble (I have loads of this fabric and no immediate need for another dress) and I think it paid off pretty well. Happy days! Here's a wee out-take of me looking extremely goofy with happiness about my dress:
I genuinely can't remember what I was doing when I was captured in this moment of natural beauty and effortless elegance but I thought I'd treat you all to it.
Right now, on that note I'm off. Tonight I'm going to eat some ice-cream and watch a film. This film:
And then I will be like this...
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