make this look: independent patterns

I flipppppped out when I first discovered the Sew Weekly feature "Make This Look" when I was getting into the online sewing community. It shows you how you can recreate designs (dresses, primarily) from ModCloth, Anthropologie, Ruche, etc. using comparable patterns and fabric. Very clever, as many of us seamsters love a lil' copycatting. I'm not sure if Mena has some kind of ModCloth endorsement or what, as it seems like she's promoting their items at the same time as encouraging us to make our own versions of stuff instead of buying theirs. Here's an example:

Make This Look

Original Dress

I have noticed that almost all of the Make This Look pattern recommendations are commercial patterns, though there's an exception or two (see here). Anyway, when I was on ModCloth the other day I kept discovering items that looked an awful lot like some of our favorite independent pattern designs. I thought some of the similar ones were worth sharing.

Disclaimer: I'm not in any way accusing anyone of copying designs. Not sure how that'd happen in these cases anyway, and it's nearly impossible to draw that line when it comes to fashion. I just found this interesting!

The Frond Bombshell ($190, yikeys) is eerily similar to the Lonsdale dress pattern by Sewaholic, even the tea length of the skirt. The ModCloth design is actually a halter, though, while the Lonsdale has straight straps that connect to the back bodice. I think the Lonsdale is well-suited for a large-scale graphic print like this one.

The Palm of Your Hand dress ($115) reminded me of a slightly more conservative version of the popular bombshell dress from Gertie's online course on Craftsy. Gertie's dress has a lower neckline and a zip back, while ModCloth's has elastic shirring in the back.

The shape of the Catalogue Your Dots ($143) dress is similar to the Lily dress from Colette's Spring/Summer 2012 pattern line. Obviously there are differences in the collar and gathering of the skirt. I kinda like the idea of adding buttons to the front of a Lily. You know, I'm really struggling with the fact that the ModCloth dress is $142.99. It's 100% cotton and unlined... Just, why?

Duh. This is the first dress I saw that made me go, wait - I know that pattern... The Strawberry Cobbler dress ($65) is a nearly dead ringer for a Cambie dress pattern by Sewaholic, except how the bodice is shaped by gathers instead of darts. ModCloth's has an open upper back, too. I don't know if I could handle a Cambie so sickeningly sweet as it is in this fabric, but I'm down with the idea of using contrasting fabric as an accent.

It's kinda hard to tell in this (questionable) print, but the Dandelion Around skirt ($35) resembles Megan Nielsen's new Kelly Skirt pattern. Two buttons on the wide waistband, two pleats in the same place, but in-seam instead of scoop pockets (and a weird long underlayer?). I still want a Kelly skirt in a print, like Roobeedoo's.

Uh, can I get a whoa. The Behold the Emerald Dress ($50) is crazy close to the Miz Mozelle dress pattern by Jamie Christina. That green color is beautiful. I might want this pattern now.

Speaking of Jamie Christina, this Dockside Date knit maxi dress ($53) is just like her ever-popular Mission Maxi pattern. Even has a racerback, though more pronounced. After I made this connection, I saw the ModCloth version on A Beautiful Mess, worn by Elsie (here). Dear ModCloth, I'm a blogger, too. Can you send me free clothes? Eh, whatever, I'll just sew them.

You'd think that seeing all these similarities in the RTW world would make me inclined to shrug and say, "Why sew it when I can just buy it?" Somehow, though, it affirms my love of sewing, and makes me proud that I could reproduce these good-looking garments in my own home. Plus - seeing the original price$ of the ModCloth dre$$e$ make$ me really motivated to keep $ewing my own $tuff. 

Seen any independent design lookalikes in the RTW world lately? I'm curious - Does it make you pleased that you have the option to sew similar designs yourself, or does it discourage you from sewing in any way?

business cas.

This past winter, I initially "signed up for" Scruffy Badger's New Look 6000 Frock Fest. I couldn't make time to buy the fabric and sew up the pattern, though, so I gave up and ducked out sheepishly (or, duckishly). Blogging-related guilt is one of the strangest types of guilt. Maybe I'll do a sociological analysis of this. Hm no.

Anyway, here's my stab at the New Look 6000 frock, beyond late to the fest. I know, I know. Something's... off. Can you spot it?

It's not the fact that I haven't mastered the sad-60s-secretary pout that this model has. It's that my side pleats lay on the right side of my body, instead of the left side where they're supposed to be. Meh. No parents, no rules. This is an easy mistake because the whole front is just one weird accordion-looking piece, and as someone who's sewn from several dozens of patterns in my life, I automatically placed the pattern piece to cut on the wrong side of the fabric. Oops. Wrong side. 

Venture onward.

This is a risky pattern for me. Shift dresses make me self conscious, and even in a double knit this required a lot of tweaking on fit: take in a thousand inches around the waist and lower back, let out a thousand inches in the hips. Luckily the center back seam and darts help with adjustments like that. And yet, the fabric still drags and pulls in mysterious ways. As for the front, it's unfortunate that the pattern has no way to help shape the side opposite all those pleats. On my initial fitting, it drooped sadly on my left half so I made the pleats deeper and longer to take in some of the extra fabric. It worked okay.

I had a weird feeling about these pleats from the beginning. Especially in gray, it kept reminding me of...

Oh dear. 

Overall, I feel fine about this dress but I actually doubt I'll wear it that often. It's not, uh, something I'd wear out with my peers or anything. Luckily it didn't take too long because I used a Ponteroma knit and omitted the zipper and back vent. I jumped into this project quickly because I'm starting a new job this coming week (in my new city!) and I wanted some more "business casual" attire. But maybe wearing a figure-hugging armadillo dress with little chicken wing sleeve cuffs isn't the best first impression. 

How many animal names have I mentioned in this blog post? Badger, sheep, duck, armadillo, chicken. Five.

Do any of you have suggestions or recommendations for other office-appropriate dress patterns that don't feature shark gills?

Shark. That makes six.

a kouple kellys

I was a lucky tester for Megan Nielsen's newest pattern, the Kelly Skirt, and now that she's released it into the wild (see here) I thought I should share my creations. Plural. In all, I've made this skirt three times. It's that easy and fills a lot of gaps in the wardrobe. 

Button-down skirts simply don’t exist in the commercial pattern world, it seems. I would go ahead and tell you how many straight skirts with a side zipper there are between Simplicity and McCalls, but I’m not sure I could count that high. For independent designs, there’s just the Colette Beignet, the Wiksten Tulip (wait -- it's not in her shop; is it no longer available?), and now the Megan Nielsen Kelly. I think the Kelly fits in nicely with the competition. It’s high-waisted with a thick waistband, deep hem and pleats for shaping. Can’t resist the scoop pockets on the front. 

The fabric recommendations for this skirt are midweight wovens, like denim, corduroy and linen. I used cotton sateen on my tester version, a linen/cotton blend on my second version and rayon challis for my third. Yea, by the third skirt I strayed away from the rules like the reckless sewasaurus I am, but I think a light and breezy fabric works quite well with this design, if you’re looking for more drape and a less-pronounced A-line shape. 

This one was made with Robert Kaufman yarn-dyed Essex linen I found on Fabricworm. The vertical threads are dyed black and the horizontal are white, which gives an overall effect of textured heather gray. It’s 55% flax linen/45% cotton so it claimed it wouldn’t wrinkle as easily as pure linen. Ahem. Because I didn’t have a washer and dryer at the time, I hand-washed and hung this fabric to dry. Unfortunately the wrinkles from washing, rinsing and wringing seem permanently set in no matter how vigorously I iron. Life goes on, clothes wrinkle on. 

I added some piping (without the… pipe) to the pocket edges just for fun. 

This fabric is quite scratchy, so I underlined the whole skirt in Bemberg rayon. Bright red, o’ course. If you underline yours, make sure you pleat the layers separately. I tried pleating them together to save time, but that made for some large puffy pleats -- not cute.

My latest Kelly version was made in a tobacco-colored rayon challis from ye olde JoAnn. Being a semi-pro at the Kelly by the point, and not having to add an underlining, I whipped this up in what seemed like no time. This pattern is designated as "beginner" level and I stand by it.

My machine ACTUALLY cooperated, too, and allowed me to make buttonholes without provoking a wrestling match like it usually does. I think the pattern calls for seven buttons total but I used eight on both of these versions.

So, if you’re looking to make a simple and casual or semi-casual skirt with room for customization, Kelly’s your girl… er, pattern. Is it just me, or does the name Kelly always ring a "bell"... 

Do you think Kelly Kapowski would ever wear a Kelly skirt? Or is she more of a neon mini-skirt and pastel floral pants kind of girl? To each her own. 

So tell me... is the Kelly skirt in your sewing future?

guest post: house shoes tutorial

Hey, I made shoes! Kinda. Check it out... I have a guest post on Megan Ta Da today, sharing a tutorial on how to make some summer slippers. Megan's a sewing/art/travel/awesome blogger who's currently studying art in a stone village in the south of France for the summer. Boring, right? Because of the theme of her blog, I wanted to incorporate my own travel memories into my sewing, so I made some Japanese-inspired house shoes. Japan's the only foreign country off North America I've visited, actually. Seems like I need to cross the sea more, but why leave my home when I can putter around in these cute slippers all day?

See the post here to learn how to make your own!

Is your home a shoes-off zone?

picmonkey secrets

Do any of you out there use PicMonkey at all? When Picnik was absorbed by the Google behemoth, I decided to look elsewhere for free online photo editing sites so I wouldn't have to sign up for Google Plus. PicMonkey's not bad, for being free. Its features are more user-friendly than the Picasa on my computer, especially since it actually allows you to resize the photos.

But, it has a dark side. An intriguing and admittedly tempting side.

... the TOUCH UP section.

Uh, yeah. They've always had a "Weight Loss" option, which shrinks the image width-wise. But they just recently added a "Nip Tuck" option, which lets you warp the photo to make you look slimmer. Or, if you're not careful, look like a smug alien:

I thought I'd try to edit one of my photos for real, just to see. I'm only curious! Maybe. Here's the Before and After of an unused photo from the batch I took of my floral print dress. Besides rotating and cropping the photo, I also did some tune-ups on myself. Shine reduction, wrinkle remover, airbrush, spray tan, teeth whitening, mascara, nip tuck...

Ha! Well, maybe I can use PicMonkey to crop out the Target shopping basket that sneaked its way into my home (illegally), and maybe it can make my face look less ghostly. But it's obviously not the best option for transforming my body while trying to show off the clothes I made. The floral print got all blurry where I tried to nip tuck my waist/hips and and then "re-fill" my bust area. I bet a skilled graphic artist who's not using a laptop mouse pad could make me look reaaaal good, but the best I can do is to make my right arm look like plastic while not even making it look slimmer.

How do you all feel about this whole PicMonkey "touch up" option? Would you ever secretly nip-tuck your hips or airbrush those under-eye circles? Or is it sad that these options even exist when we're supposed to have unrelenting love for our bodies?

Alright. Brief topic change. Let me explain why I haven't been sewing or blogging lately:

I have transformed my living room into a free advertisement for all the major chain home improvement stores!

Moving up north in t-minus two days. Whimper, squeal, grin, groan.

floral petal dress

Did you think I forgot how to sew woven fabrics? Well, I did. Or at least I forgot that it's possible to hem a garment without inducing an anxiety attack.

Let's talk prints. In the past couple months on this blog, we've seen chevron prints. We've also seen plaids and stripes and dots, birdies and birdy feathers, blue checks and bigger blue checks. What's obviously missing are florals --the sure sign of summer/wedding season. I guess you could consider my Cambie fabric to be a floral, but I think of it as more of an... abstract weed.

I'm super picky about floral prints. It's a tricky design, as a certain combination of colors, design and scale can make it look either too sweet or too matronly. I've been trying to pin down what it is about certain floral prints that I find either agreeable or sickly, but it's a fairly unstable relationship we have. Generally speaking, the flowers need to be well-spaced, or oversized, or looks like they're drawn by a 5 year old. Like normally I'm more drawn to stuff like this:

source

source

source

and I'm obsessed with almost all Nani IRO fabric:

can't source the actual fabric, but photo is from here

So it's kinda weird that I went for this busy-ish small-scale floral. But, I LIKE it.

The fabric buying all happened within the span of two minutes max. I opened a promo e-mail from Denver Fabrics entitled "Huge Fabric Sale - Linen, Rayon and More," clicked through to the rayon challis section, saw this floral print at the top of the list for like $4.50/yd., tossed two yards in my virtual shopping cart, confirmed on PayPal, then made my morning coffee. I knew immediately what pattern I'd use: something for which I made a muslin so long ago that I've since lost it.

Hospital gown chic, you say? Luckily there's this thing called "Google" in which you type a pattern name and number -- in this case Vogue 8631 -- and up pops photographic evidence of bloggers posing in successful versions of the pattern. It actually makes a fine dress, despite what you may think of the waifs posing in weird muu-muus on the cover. Sizing is definitely an issue, though, so just be aware that you'll probably have to scale down. I made an 8 in the bodice and a 10 in the skirt (2 sizes smaller than the size I'm supposed to make and 1 size smaller than the size I normally make). 

If you're anything less than a Dolly Parton, you may have to adjust the bodice wrap accordingly. For me that meant taking wedges out of the shoulder seams so the top wouldn't droop as much. I also sewed deeper into the upper side seams to reduce the armhole gaps there. Even after tightening up the wrap, I would never ever wear this without a camisole underneath.

YES it's a real wrap dress. There's a tie on the inside so the underwrap stays attached to the sideseam, and there's a shoddily sewn hook and eye that attaches the overwrap to the exterior side seam.

I have to be pretty careful of how I stand or walk against the wind. The underwrap provides okay coverage but I think I flashed a nice (or naughty) bit of thigh to the grocery store parking lot. I like the dress design in a drapey fabric, but the pleats behave strangely without structure. Gravity works against them so they sort of fall open. I decided to stitch them down a couple inches so they'd permanently lay neat and flat instead of flop open at the waistline.

That's my hand in a side pocket, not a hip growth, btw. I nixed the bias-tape-finished hem and used Stitchy Witch's method of baby hemming it like she did on her version of the dress. Can't believe I never thought before of serging the raw edge first to mark an even line for folding and pressing. Doy. If I could move through the rest of my sewing life without using a seam gauge, I would. 

Maybe this is why I don't wear florals that often. Pollen allergies:

...or Paranormal Activity? You decide.

What's your preferred kind of floral, or do you love them all? Steer clear of them all?

cardi-gangbuster

I have an obsession with drapey and slightly oversized cardigans. My collection of them is reasonable right now, but I have plans to totally take over my closet and my life with them. This was my first attempt at making one and it has only fueled the cardi fire. It's one of those pieces I want to plan all my outfits around so I can wear it non-stop.

It's a Vogue pattern, oddly. I say "oddly" because I almost never buy nor make Vogue patterns. They're either weird or, as we've discussed, make it impossible to tell what the garment looks like because the sample is made up in crazy busy fabric or the model is crouching away from the camera in pain.

Luckily this Very Easy Vogue 8819 just featured some dead-eyed illustrated women on the cover so I didn't have to interpret too much. It has sleeveless and full-length sleeve options, too, but I went with the half-sleeves so I could cross over seasons.

As you can see, the main design features are all these bias-cut pieces that intersect at various seams. As you can also see, it's an OCD print-matcher's basic nightmare. If you are obsessive about your stripes, perhaps you shouldn't attempt this pattern in a striped fabric. Maybe I cut slightly off but I sometimes found it impossible to match the stripes all the way down certain seams, so I just had to focus on making it symmetrical instead of perfectly continual. I ain't mad. It's easier to get away with jaggedness in thin and narrowly-spaced stripes than in thicker stripes.

The back center seam is the one where print-matching is entirely possible AND crucial, however. The pattern actually has you cut two pieces for the lower back that you're supposed to stitch together at the C.B., but I straightened out the flare and cut it on the fold to save myself even more stripe-matching agony. This just meant I had to sew a V to an inverted V, but for me it was worth the technique swap. 

I made a Medium, and you can tell it's a little big because the seams dip off my shoulders, and I'm often tempted to push the sleeves up. I like my cardigans to be a bit slouchy, though, especially when I wear them over short or more fitted dresses like this one. Makes the coverage feel more balanced or something.

Let's talk about the cardigan flare, though. I narrowed the A-line of the bottom back pieces by about five inches overall. I like 'em slouchy but I don't like 'em boxy. I also didn't want it to look like I had an Oreo-themed curtain draped over my booty:

So that's that. A cardigan, just in time for the drippiest 103-degree death heat of summer. I'm just that kind of seamster. I make short-sleeve floral tops in January and elbow-length cardigans in July. 

Oh and don't think I forgot about our little agreement from my last post. I never break a blog promise, so here you go. I went with this McCalls model because our dresses were the same color:

You guys, this pose was surprisingly difficult to master. I almost popped my hip out of socket. Your feet are pointed completely sideways, in line, but your torso and head have to face directly forward, and you have to be able to touch your knee while your body is upright and not slouched forward at all. Not to mention the Tyra eye smoulder. That's BUSINESS. Who knew pattern modeling would take such quad strength? 

Keep it up, McCalls. Those girls got talent.

So who shares my cardigan obsession, even in summer? Or maybe I should ask who isn't a fan of cardigans, so I can squint at you (Tyra-style) through my computer screen and say, "...f'real?"