Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Vincent minidress

Finally I got back to sewing! I think I broke myself a bit on making that 1950's party dress for New Years. That does of course not mean I've been doing nothing, there's always something creative going on. For the last few months, it's been music.

To make a long story short, I've been longing to get back to sewing, but just not found any reason/garment interesting enough to make me. Then, a fellow musician shared this video on facebook:



Not only did it remind me of what an amazing song that is, but obviously also of the wonderful art of Vincent Van Gogh. And, shortly after that, I checked The Sew Weekly and found the theme of the week to be art. Figuring that must be a sign, I decided to make something very colorful and lively, inspired by Vincent. I went with a super simple mini dress with some hippie vibe. Here's my result:

Why, yes I just had to get a little extra creative working on the picture! It took forever, so the collage is the only one.
The dress is really hard to photograph, it gets very flat under the flash and the color is a bit off, the picture below is perhaps closer to the truth.
I left the edges raw, but zigzaged a couple of rows inside of the edge, both for decoration and for making sure it wont fray. The material is some sort of stretchy sweatshirt kind of fabric so I think it will most likely just roll instead of fray.
And here's the pattern I used, year unknown as with many old Swedish patterns... I shortened it A LOT, (I didn't have enough fabric, surprise surprise!), lowered the neckline quite a bit and cut the sleeves to about elbow length. Also I ignored the fact that the pattern called for a zipper. I can wiggle into the dress fairly easy anyway!
All in all, it took me 2 hours, maybe 2,5 to get this done. Why on earth did I put sewing off for so long?