Sewing a new dress

The fabric of this dress is my most favourite I've ever bought. Although I have two boxes stuffed to the brim with vintage fabric, I don't believe you can ever have too much and will sometimes have a little browse through eBay to see if there's anything going cheap. This was one such find, and for only £4! I simply adore the pastel colour scheme, and how the pattern is on the border between mod and psychedelic. It's a vintage polycotton so I knew it would make the perfect summer dress, and I didn't want to over complicate the design so the focus remained on the fab pattern. So a trusty tent dress it was!

I didn't measure how much of the fabric there was before I began chopping into it, but there was literally just enough for this dress pattern and my headscarf. The only remnants I have left are the tiny little moon shapes from the neckline.




I had a real pig of a time trying to sew this dress, and I'm still not sure why everything kept going wrong. My machine just hated the fabric for some reason and it kept messing with the thread tension, and it was also like I'd just forgotten how to construct a dress. I don't know if it's because I'd just finished sewing something complicated so was perhaps feeling cocky at such a simple pattern I thought I could blast out in a couple of hours, but I lost count of the amount of times I had to unpick the seams. It's all worth it though because this has quickly become one of my favourite dresses, and one I'm sure to get plenty of wear out of this summer. I just love a tent dress.

dress and scarf - handmade // necklace - 1960s vintage // shoes and bag - orla kiely