I always love to see what you do with our sewing patterns, and it’s especially fun to see how you customize them to make them your own.
Here is an excellent example.
This gorgeous Family Reunion Dress was sewn by Nicole, who makes all sorts of terrific things for her five children. Nicole lives in Australia and blogs at Five and Counting.
I asked her for some details about the alterations she made to the pattern, and here is what she said:
I used a chartreuse dupioni silk for the dress and a pearly pink thai silk for the trim. I pre-washed the fabric in my machine on a gentle load with Pantene shampoo and conditioner (mix the conditioner with water first) and line dried. I have continued to wash the dress the same way, and all the lemonade and cake comes out.
The alterations were very few. I lengthened the short sleeves straight down without tapering the line. When sewing the sleeves I created a simple elastic casing and used 1/2 inch non-curl elastic so it had some width and firmness. Using the contrast thai silk I made two simple ties and sewed them in place at the seam of the cuff. They simply tie around her wrist after dressing.
The neck was a folded strip of the same silk. I think it may have been double the neck measurement? I sewed the ends and turned it to have a neat finish.
I basted the ruffle to the wrong side of the dress and then pinned the right side of the facing over that and sewed them all together [follow the sewing instructions for the facing, but sandwich the ruffle between the facing and the wrong side of the dress] and then turned the facing to the outside (after trimming the neckline).
I replaced the front tab with a ruffle of the thai silk approximately the same length and hand sewed a little silver charm to the bottom of the ruffle.
Isn’t it beautiful? Here it is in action. You can see more photos of Nicole’s sewing on Flickr, too.
I’ve just created a new pinterest board called “Customizing with Oliver + S” where I thought it would be fun to collect inspiration, both of clothing that you’ve sewn and of images I see that give me ideas of ways you might want to customize our patterns. We’ll blog more in-depth looks at some of these ideas, too, so I hope you’ll find lots of inspiration for your own projects.
And as always, I can’t wait to see what you make!