Sewing: A Purple Dress Made With Vintage Laura Ashley Fabric and Birthday Spoils

Time to unveil another of my sewing project creations, this time it was a purple dress made from vintage Laura Ashley fabric. I used a Butterick pattern that was fairly simple despite having pockets, binding and a full skirt, I picked the variation with sleeves but I like the style so much I am probably going to make another without sleeves too in a different fabric.

I made this one in an evening and day, which I though was pretty good going! There are a few niggles with my sewing technique but in general I found it much more comfortable than the first one I made so maybe I am getting better! I wore it with a navy cardigan for a trip out although it is still freezing so I needed to wear chunky boots which somehow means that the whole thing looks a little bit 1990s:

I really really like the fit and style of this dress so I will definitely be making it in another fabric. I also think that with the addition of a simple waistband this would make a really ice full skirt - with pockets - I love pockets!

It was also my birthday this week and with my hair growing steadily more and more dishevelled I felt the need to experiment with proper hair styling. So after a little bit of research I decided to use my birthday money to buy a pair of these gorgeous GHDs in a mint green colour from the candy collection...

Of course I decided to experiment. Now I didn't take a before shot (thank goodness) but here is the after styling shot. I went for the sleek on top, curly at the bottom look. What do you think? 

Do you have any top tips for using straighteners?

Sewng: Home-made Dress from a Vintage Pattern

Hello everyone! Just a short post to show you something I've been working on this week.

Before I start I wanted to let you know that I added a Bloglovin' button over there -->

so you can follow on there when whatever happens to Google reader finally happens.

Anywho. A little while ago I had a phase of ordering some vintage patterns and vintage fabric. I managed to get a few bargain things but until recently I had not taken the plunge and actually made anything, that is, until this week!

I made a dress! A whole dress! It even fit me :)

I bought a long piece of fabric (6m x 1.5m) from eBay thinking it would be enough for maybe two dresses and it only cost £6 so it was cheap enough to be able to practice on (although it was pretty so I wanted to make something nice). I chose a Realm pattern, I'm not sure when from but it expect 1950s based on the packaging. It turned out to be fairly simple to make, I think in total I spent about 6 hours on the dress which isn't too bad going.

The skirt turned out to be a little less full than expected but that may be partly because I didn't believe the sizing and sewed the darts a bit bigger than I was meant to. Consequently the dress came out a little bigger than I'd have liked but on the whole it only needs mildly tweaking.

I can't describe quite how proud I am of this first dress, hopefully there will be many more to come (I have already picked out my next pattern and fabric to try).

Have you ever made anything?