Say hello to Sophia, who is officially my littlest customer! She’s enjoying blowing some bubbles in sunny California, which is the furthest one of my dresses has travelled!
I have a little piece of this gorgeous Liberty fabric left – enough to make an adult tunic in any size, or a child’s dress up to age 6. I must pop those options into the shop for you!
Facebook’s “On This Day” feature has just kindly informed me that I made this tunic dress on July 26th 2011 – so it’s six years old today!
This is how it looked when I first made it – with a ruffle around the bottom, and a matching elastic belt. I don’t think the belt has ever been worn, mainly because I’ve had stomach ache since at least 2005, and I can’t stand having anything tight around my waist for any length of time. (Please don’t ask me why I made it, I have absolutely no idea.) The ruffle around the hem was also short-lived, partly because it made the tunic a slightly peculiar length, and partly because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was dressed like a three year old whenever I wore it! So that had the scissors taken to it a long time ago.
This is what the tunic looks like now – with thanks to Sarah of Rainbright Photography, who takes such lovely outdoor portraits.
The fabric’s a bit less crisp than it used to be, having been washed many, many times in the past six years. I haven’t ironed it as often as I probably should have done, as I think this fabric looks quite nice when it’s a little bit crumply. The colour’s faded a little bit, but not too much.
I’ve been wearing this tunic pretty much all the time while the weather’s been warm, and I definitely need to make some more. It’s such an easy-to-wear style, it looks great with jeans, and it’s lovely and soft and floaty and comfortable. Lisa from Off With Her Head Millinery clearly agrees with me, as she’s just ordered her third one in this length – thank you Lisa!
I’m not offering tunic lengths in the children’s sizes at the moment, mainly because the nice thing about these dresses is that they naturally turn into tunics as kids grow. If I make them too short in the first place they won’t last as long, and I think it would be a shame for them to be outgrown too quickly. But for those of us who aren’t getting taller any time soon – tunics are now available!
Look how happy Charlotte is, in her bumblebee dress! She chose to wear it especially for her birthday party, and apparently put the pockets to good use for keeping hold of the yellow party blower – the best one, obviously!
Charlotte chose the fabric herself when she came to visit me (with her mum, Joanna, who’s recently started a great blog) and spent the day telling everybody that I’d made her dress. How lovely is that?!
Say hello to my lovely niece, Milly, who spent a pleasant summer evening in the pub wearing her new upcycled Bambi dress! I’ve been saving this fabric for several years, until Milly was old enough to know who Bambi was. Turns out that six is the perfect age!
The fabric is from an original 1980s duvet cover, which I used a long time ago to make a bolero jacket for a friend. I had just enough left over to make this dress for Milly, and another little one for the shop, to fit age 3.
I’ve actually been making this dress for Milly for, I think, about three years now. I make one for her birthday, one for Christmas, and sometimes one for Hallowe’en as well. At some point I’ll do a round-up and show you the amazing variety you can get out of one simple dress – including being an angel in the school play! (I’m still finding bits of glitter and feathers from that one…)
The little book she’s holding can be found in the pocket of every dress I send out – and I’ve filmed a quick and easy tutorial for making your own, which you can link to from the sidebar to the right!
Hello! I’m in an underpass, contemplating a painted barn owl. Paul pointed out to me afterwards that I should have held my hand out to make it look as though the owl was flying to me. Next time…
So, this is what the Celestial dress looks like during a casual summer lunchtime walk to the pharmacy. (I go to all the best places!) This fabric is interestingly chameleonic – it transforms from blue to grey depending on where you’re standing and who’s looking at you. Which means that it goes with just about everything, like your favourite pair of ancient jeans, but it also makes it extremely difficult to photograph the colour accurately.
(Oh, and, I’ve moved the pockets a little bit further down the dress since I made this one.)
As you can see, I’m wearing bloomers underneath. I wear them a lot in the summer, when leggings are just too hot. This pair is made from lightweight cotton lawn, with an embroidered trim that has tiny little pears on it!
I first started wearing these bloomers when I worked at a museum that was carefully climate-controlled. I wore them as an extra layer under long dresses, with knee socks, so they’re carefully designed to be just the right length that your knees don’t get cold when you sit down. When I ventured out into places that were considerably warmer than eighteen degrees (so, everywhere, these past few weeks!) I discovered that they were absolutely brilliant for preventing your legs from getting all sticky and uncomfortable in the heat.
I’ve been contemplating making a few pairs for the shop, in a very lightweight muslin and trimmed with vintage nylon lace. I’ll make a couple of sample pairs so you can have a look at them, and see whether you’d like a pair or two, too.
I’m really enjoying taking photos of the dresses hanging up in my lilac tree. Okay, it’s not going to be as picturesque in winter, but at the moment I think the website looks rather nice with pictures of dresses-up-trees.
However, I’m aware that this doesn’t really show what the dresses look like on an Actual Person, which is quite different from how they look on the hanger! So, I thought I’d have a go at taking some dress-selfies. How hard could that be? Well, given that the photo below is the best of an afternoon’s faffing about, the answer turned out to be “quite hard, actually”!
This one’s called “Argh, the self-timer’s still on!”. Although, to give it a tiny bit of credit, you can at least sort of see what the dress looks like when there’s a person inside it I suppose!
This one my husband took when he got home from work, by which time I was so flustered and cross that I didn’t really want the camera pointing at me, and I didn’t know where to look, and now it seems as though the dress is making me cross and uncomfortable. Which it isn’t. I did that all by myself. And I got a great big insect bite on my foot from standing in the shrubbery!
We tried again the next day, in a car park. That resulted in a photo so bad that many filters were required to make it look… less bad. (I don’t think it’s worked…)
I think the best solution is probably going to be to make lots of sample dresses, and save up for a Proper Model and a Proper Photographer. In the meantime, I think I’m going to stick with Dresses Up Trees, and photos sent in by my lovely customers. I’m starting to collect a few of those now, and they never fail to make me smile.
Meet Alice & Kaylee, two very happy customers! Apparently Alice has filled her pockets with STUFF already. Way to go, Alice!
I’m quietly encouraging everyone to use the hashtag #magpieinmypocket for sharing pictures of the treasures you put in the pockets of these dresses. I wonder what Alice has chosen to keep in hers?
Thank you to Lisa of Off With Her Head Millinery (check out her lovely new website!) for sharing this lovely photo with us. Lisa has an eternal magpie tunic dress too, so hopefully we’ll get to see a picture of all three of the Off With Her Head ladies soon!
I’ve been down this dressmaking road before, and this time I definitely wasn’t going to accept custom orders, and I certainly wasn’t going to accept custom orders made using the customer’s own fabric. Organic cottons and ethically-sourced fabrics only, this time. Definitely.
And then… my friend Lisa, from Off With Her Head Millinery, sent me a message. She’d bought some fabric to make dresses for her daughters… would it be suitable for making my dresses instead? Photos were sent, and then fabric was sent, and her eldest daughter now has a lovely little dress in a floral print with bees, ladybirds, butterflies and caterpillars hidden amongst the flowers. So cute!
But what absolutely sealed the deal for me was this. Lisa’s youngest daughter had chosen this fabric for a Batman dress. How could I possibly resist?
It was quite a small piece of fabric for such a large print, so I had to cut very carefully to make sure that Batman wasn’t upside down or decapitated in too many places! With a multi-directional print this was quite a challenge, but I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out.
Ta-da!
I’m not sending the parcel off straight away, as I still have a dress for Lisa to make first. The fabric for Lisa’s dress is a fantastic one too – I can’t wait to show it to you!
I’ve had these three dresses hanging over my wardrobe doors for a couple of weeks now, trying to decide which is my favourite, and which I should therefore make again.
Trouble is, I haven’t really been wearing dresses lately, as I tend to reach for them only in the heights of summer and winter. Last winter was so mild we didn’t see a single flake of snow, and so I didn’t need my usual winter outfits of leggings (or bloomers and knee socks), a long petticoat, a long sleeve t-shirt, a long flowing dress, and a jumper. This summer… well, we haven’t quite reached it yet, and so I’m in a limbo of chinos and t-shirts, or ancient jeans that I really should have thrown out already.
I wore the dress on the right (Vogue 9112, Marcy Tilton’s “Cirque” dress) to visit a friend, and it turned out to be perfect for having a picnic on the lawn, followed by having a small plastic car driven over my knees on the sofa. What more could I ask of a dress? I wore it with yoga pants, as it was always my intention for this one to be more of a tunic style. (I am also eagerly awaiting the release of the Dottie Angel Dress pattern, for tunic-making purposes.)
The middle dress, Advance 8065, a 1956 pattern, I wore to work on my last day at the Museum. It was comfortable, but I do need a slightly longer slip to wear underneath it, to stop it from catching on my bloomers and going all bunchy around the knees. (Either that or I need to start making my bloomers in silk rather than cotton!)
I’d had the same issue the day before, when I wore a not-quite-finished dress, which had started life as a shirt but ended up with the skirt from the pattern above added to the bottom. It still needs a placket and buttons, but although it was a bit tricky to get off again, it held together okay with a big brooch at the collar!
But did I enjoy wearing it enough to finish this one and make another? At the moment I’m not sure. I feel as though a dress should be an easy option for an outfit. One garment, pop it on, add a cardigan, and away you go. Somehow the reality of having to pair a dress with a bra slip and bloomers makes it seem like more trouble than it’s worth.
As for this one, the dress on the left in the top photo (Butterick 4637, a 1970s pattern), I haven’t worn it more than a few times since I made it, and most of those times were as soon as it came off the machine. Even having it hanging around in full view simply isn’t tempting me to put it on. Maybe because the fabric’s quite dark, so it feels like a winter dress. Perhaps it would be better with leggings and a long sleeved t-shirt underneath. It just doesn’t feel right for summer, somehow.
I still haven’t had a proper sort-out of the side of the wardrobe that hides all of my dresses, so perhaps I need to do that before I decide anything. This year I definitely feel more drawn towards novelty prints and vintage styles than I do towards my long floppy linen dresses and long petticoats. But maybe that’s just because the weather hasn’t warmed up yet, and it’ll be tunics and petticoats and bloomers all the way once the sun comes out.
All I know is that I currently have so much stuff that I’m feeling totally overwhelmed by it. I definitely need to make a concerted effort to sew things that I’m actually going to wear, rather than being tempted by interesting patterns and pretty fabrics. Either that, or actually stop sewing for a while, and concentrate on wearing the things I have already. We’ll see.
Last month we sent my niece, Milly, a box full of arty and crafty things for her fourth birthday. Paul picked out lots of stickers that he thought Milly would like (the wobbly eyes were especially popular), and we’ve just received this fantastic Thank You card. Isn’t it cute?
There was also a Birthday Dress, of course, as well as a little pile of tote bags made in Frozen fabric, for everyone at her birthday party.
This year’s dress is McCalls 6022, another one with finishing techniques far more complicated than I would have expected for an “everyday” kind of dress like this – and especially one marked “Easy”! I had one metre of fabric, and only just managed to squeeze the dress out of it by cutting the yokes, pockets, and the “contrast” band at the bottom on the cross. I think this works quite well, as it gives all of the different characters a chance to appear the right way up!
The thing I like about these dresses is that they last for quite a long time. Even though Milly’s quite tall, she can carry on wearing this as a tunic or top over jeans or leggings, long after she’s outgrown it as a dress. I have this pattern up to age 6, so I expect I’ll be making a few more versions of it over the next couple of years. I will be re-writing the instructions though, to make the finishing a bit less fiddly. (And buying a little bit more fabric next time!)
