Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

I've been wanting to make more dresses to improve my sewing skills and kill time / use up excess fabric stash so since my friend Aimi is always complimenting my dresses I offered to make her one for her birthday. She had already picked out a fabric she liked from a bargain hoard I bought from lovely Helen : And although I secretly wanted to keep that fabric for myself, as everyone knows, bagsy is a complete and final done deal! I used vintage Style pattern 2382 again: Regular readers might remember that I used it before for this dress , except this time I made it sleeveless (last time I used the sleeve pattern from the overcoat and adjusted it for use in the dress). This pattern is not really intended for stretch fabrics, but the fabric I was using was stretchy, however I found that it didn't make much difference other than being slightly trickier to sew! Despite that it turned out as one of the most well-made and fabulous dresses I've ever created: And luckily ...

A quick update today to show off a dress I made last weekend using some vintage fabric given to me by my friend Laura (regular readers will remember her from  this post ); here is the fabric in colour: And I used vintage Style pattern 2382: which I had picked up at  Lou Lou's Vintage Fair  in October last year for about £2.50. Including thread and fastenings, the dress cost less than £10 to make! The dress is supposed to be sleeveless so I took the sleeve pattern from the coat and used it with the dress. I also had to make lots of adjustments as I found that the pattern was very big! Here is the dress in action on monday night: Photos by  Jonathan Salariya (I also DJ in my spare time). As you can see, I added little heart shaped patch pockets to the front because hardly any of my dresses have pockets and I like to have somewhere to keep my crumbs and bits of fluff.