My first wrap dress... for a very long time

Wow what a heatwave we seem to be having!

I hope you are all enjoying the warm weather and I hope it continues for a little while longer at least. It can make up for all that rain last year around this time.

Anywho, I went down south for a training day at my new job and I stopped off briefly at Brighton to catch up with a few friends. During the visit I decided to wear a wrap dress, which was possibly not the greatest choice as Brighton tends to be notoriously windy, especially by the beach.

The dress itself was bought from a charity shop and is probably from the 1980s based on the bright colours and styling. It is the first wrap dress I have bought in a very long time as I tend to find them a bit difficult to wear, they don't usually fit right around the bust and the waist, but I made an exception for this one as it seemed to hang quite well. It has a 50s style collar and is sleeveless so it is perfect for summer.

I decided to team it with a red cardigan and ballet pumps - both from M&S.

Oh yes, and that is the lovely Brighton Pavilion behind me!

...and finally

I also got a leopard print box-pleated midi skirt from a charity shop. The skirt wasn't so great but I liked the fabric and there was tonnes of it so I decided to cut it up and make it into a dress. I havent has a lot of time for sewing lately, but I did take a picture of the cut out pieces so that you could see the fabric. I'll post the finished thing eventually when I get it done.

Until then

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?