The faux dress

Morning everyone! Today sees the publication of my latest Minerva Blogger Network post.  I got some glorious magnolia print rayon from them with plans to make the Fumeterre skirt by Deer and Doe.

This was partly because I’m a huge D&D fan girl (not dungeons and dragons, obvs!) and partly because I’ve seen loads of maxi skirts on the high street this year. Cue visions of my teenage self swanning about in crop tops and maxi skirts, pretending (in my head) to be a gypsy.

Clearly I’m not making crop tops this time around but I did fancy the comfort and ease of a maxi skirt.

The fabric behaved beautifully for a rayon; that is , as expected, it shrunk on prewashing, frayed easily and needed rather more pins than average to sew neatly! All of which I expected so it was fine.  All seams were overlocked as soon as possible and I let the finished skirt hang for a couple of days before hemming (definitely do this, the hem depth varies by about 2 inches around the skirt as different panels have dropped at different rates!)

It’s a pretty fabric hungry pattern, asking for 4m of fabric and I was worried when I looked at the cutting layout properly and realised it was designed for non directional prints, which this isn’t.  But I managed by cutting carefully on a single layer.

I then decided I didn’t want to include the hem facing.  I’m not a huge fan of these, they always seem to sag forwards and I had visions of tripping over them, so decided the panels were plenty long enough to allow for a deep hem which would give the skirt weight.

That left me with a lovely finished skirt and half a metre of uncut fabric and some large scraps.

So I decided to do a blatant copy of what I’ve seen several bloggers do and make a top which would be worn with the skirt to make it look like a dress.

As I was very short on fabric, I finally downloaded the Ogden cami by True Bias.  This has been a slow burner for me; I hated it when I first saw it, not being a fan of spaghetti straps in general (I need a bra, people, and I don’t like flashing bra straps! Old age strikes again!) However, it’s grown on me and I decided to chance it.

I managed to squeeze all the pieces onto my fabric by dint of cutting the internal facing on the cross grain.  I was concerned that it would stretch out of shape so stay stitched all edges, but actually it worked surprisingly well.  I had to grade across 3 sizes, 6 to 10 from bust to hips, but I’m pretty pleased with the final result.  It feels more secure than I thought it would (possibly that facing is helping there?) and I actually like the way it looks with skinny jeans.  Should I ever regain chance of a social life from my children, it could be a winner!

And I am so pleased with the way it looks as a dress!

For further details, head on over to Minerva Crafts and read my full post with lots of photos!

Have you had success combining separates patterns into pretend dresses?  Or is it just me?

Becca x