I have not posted anything on my blog for a while. After being asked by Sarah of Goodbye Valentino Blog to do a guest post, I decided to start reposting my creations in my own blog again. As you can see from my fabric creations I love making garments out of pieces of fabric. A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to meet a lady whose husband is an importer of fabrics. Her husband told me he sells to Mood, B and J in New York, and a number of stores on the East and West Coasts. She said I should come to her home to look through all the fabrics samples as she doesn’t know what to do with them as she does not sew. I was welcome to take whatever fabric pieces I wanted. It was almost as good as winning the lottery. I was in fabric heaven. There we so many magnificent fabrics. I spent hours looking through them and selecting the fabrics that I wanted. I selected beaded, guipure, brocade, silks and eyelet cottons. I came home with garbage bags full of fabric pieces. After I sorted through my garbage bags of treasure I decided to start by making a blouse and a skirt. Nothing says summer like a beautiful piece of white eyelet fabric. In my garbage bags of fabric pieces there were so many wonderful pieces of eyelet fabric. After looking through my patterns I settled on an OOP Vogue pattern 8791. I cut a size 12 with a B cup and made it up as is without making muslin. It is a wonderful fit. Unfortunately he blouse won’t be worn for the next 5 months as it is freezing cold here in Chicago. As you can see from my previous posts I love Crazy Patchwork. I had a pile of pieces of Chinese silk. I chose to make a skirt out of them. The pattern I used McCalls 3830. Each piece of silk is interfaced with a fusible interfacing to give the silk embroidery a more stable base. I pieced them together on Batiste. I used variegated silk thread and silk ribbons to do all the embroidery on the skirt. It has a handpicked zipper as the layers are quiet thick and it looked better than a machine sewn zipper. None of the silk pieces were long enough to cut a waistband. I did not want to piece the waistband as it would have been very bulky. I decided to use a double piece of rayon Petersham of ribbon as the waistband. The skirt is lined with a white Batiste. It is heavy as there are a few layers of fabric to this skirt. I have not worn the skirt as again it is more of a Spring/ Summer creation and there is no sign of it warming up here anytime soon. Until next time stay warm and keep sewing. Andrea |