Roberts Wood Flower Patchwork dress, a Frocktails adventure

 I have been wildly in love with this pattern since it came out. 

But in love like unrequited love.

There was the first big hump: what fabric could cope with so many unfinished edges?  I spent a year mulling this over.  I reckoned it had to be silk, maybe organza.  Something with body, so the flower petals would stick out.  The pattern consists of 3 separate sets of flowers, so you can use 3 different fabrics and you won't end up with the same fabric next to itself - or of course you can just use one fabric, or two. 

I got too curious and bought the pattern and had to recover from that for another year.  Both the financial hit, and the 5 tightly rolled up A0 pages with nothing on them but...flowers.  Hundreds of flowers.  The size is built into the pattern- and I was confident with the smallest size as it coincides neatly with my measurements.  The dress is a bit oversized, but I wouldn't have wanted it smaller, the neck hole fits just right.  It feels quite substantial around me I think that's because of the three-dimensional-ness of it. 

I bought three colours of silk organza and stuck it at the bottom of my stash.  I moved house a few times (always a good reason to procrastinate.)  I changed jobs and didn't get to sew enough...

And then moved to Auckland, a city with a Frocktails!  I put this dress on my Make 12 list for the year, deadline: Frocktails in early September.  I also reorganised my stash and thought actually the cranberry red dupioni silk, previously purchased for something else, might be a perfect fit for this.  The organza idea just didn't feel right.  Months passed and trips came and went and suddenly I actually only had two weeks until Frocktails.  

I spent two days cutting out paper flowers while my partner watched.  This improved when I realised I had an audiobook to attend to.  I thought I would stick the flowers onto the silk, cut roughly around them and then cut more precisely one by one.  To make this possible I bought the sharpest little embroidery scissors in Spotlight, a new micro-olfa cutter, and a small pink cutting mat, plus three spools of matching thread, and I hijacked the kitchen table.  

This phase took another 2 days.  And catastrophe then struck: a pile of flowers were neglected on the sewing room table...a RANDOM cross section of flowers from the three different colour ways.  And I had run out of fabric.  An emergency trip to The Fabric Store - a very lucky grab at a bolt of red dupioni silk - the last of the dupioni in stock - and an early morning trip to the laundromat later whew, all the flowers are accounted for, and hopefully the different shade of red will add texture.  Four days to go. 

I quickly realised it was better to pin the flowers to the silk for the rough cutting phase.  I just needed to get them into a pile of flowers, it didn't matter if they were a bit askew on their individual fabric pieces.  An unexpected participant joined the fun: Paivi LOVED all the excitement happening in her personal playground and joined the sweatshop with enthusiasm.  She particularly liked all the sharp objects, and unpinned bits of paper...

Cutting the flowers out on my new surgical desk: 2 days. 

I now had 2 days to sew the dress, plus the day of Frocktails which was after night shift so I could do some sewing, but nothing too strenuous.  It ended up being the bindings, done on the day from that original organza.  Organza is a terrible thing to cut and also to sew on the bias and was a horrible choice to use for bindings, so if you look closely, they are a bit messy.  

The insides! There are many micro holes at the corners where my sewing lines weren't perfect, but you can't see any of this in the dress when worn.

 

I showed up at frocktails slightly glassy eyed post night shift, and with a few faint chalk marks here and there on my dress - but DONE!  and it was a perfect way to celebrate a project that ran my life for about two weeks, while also being a kind of sanity-saver and distraction from some simultaneous health drama.  To give you some scale: I consumed 4 audiobooks during the simple parts of cutting these flowers out. 

And you know, I would do it again.  I would actually use fabric scraps and just not worry about the fraying edges and make a wildly ridiculous patchwork version of this dress.  Also, it has heaps of room and needs pockets.  I was absolutely not going there this time around but I see no reason to skip it on a future attempt.   

Papercut Patterns Axis dress, my turn!

I actually united this fabric with this pattern in my head a long time ago. It's nothing special, just a cotton lawn from Spotlight.  Not special except it is covered in *parrots*  I am a bird person, which you might not have known, and when Spotlight had a huge number of parrot prints I had to struggle and limit myself to 2 lest I end up with 37 bird prints in my wardrobe (the other smaller cut was made into my stunning success of a short Summer fling dress, here).  

I knew it wouldn't have any extra amazing drape etc but it seemed like a fun fabric to try out Axis with and because I love it there was a greater chance of my wearing it no matter what.  Frocktails was coming, I was about to travel and sewing-time poor, and this was likely to be my Frocktails dress because of timing limits on the other ideas I wanted to explore.

Rarely these days, this pattern has lots of blog reviews! Hurray!  I read Fiona's blog and based on that I did a bunch of pattern adjustments (possibly too many, arg.)

Cut size 2 at the top and tapering out to size 3 for the skirt, A line skirt (I'm no pencil skirt girl)  On this: really I could just have done size 3.  The armscye is a bit small.  Also the A line skirt is a joke, it's really practically a pencil skirt. 

Remove 1" from the waist of the top, and taper a little chunk out of the back strap to fix my sloping shoulders (that taper was a perfect fix, the shoulder fit is stupendous). 

I reckoned I would skip the little hole for the tie to go through.  It looked too airy and I'm happy to overlap.

So I made this for Frocktails.  I found the instructions surprisingly useless.  I found this to be far less fun than all those reviews suggest.  I had a lot of weird intersections that didn't line up.  I put together the top, fine, put together the skirt, ok, except it doesn't really tell you how you will finish it, so due to possibly a lack of foresight regarding the seam allowance, as I was folding over the waistband to hide my zip, it became uneven, and weirdly the folded over waistband had to totally diverge from a nice fold in order to meet the side seam.  This means no easy stitching in the ditch to get the inside held down.  On one side I hand sewed it.  On the other I left it flapping because there was nothing to attach it to.  

It wasn't really clear either exactly what goes on top: the skirt or the top? One overlaps the other, but how? I overlapped the top over the skirt.  When I put this on, either because of shortening the bodice, or because of the skirt actually being too snug, or for other mystery reasons, the skirt comes up to the small of my back.  I mean, fully.  So, unlike with everyone else, if I just tie the ties in the back, they cover my bra because they are so high up.  This therefore feels like a very enclosed dress.  In a good way, like wearing a snuggly outfit that is protecting you.  But strange, considering what everyone else says about it.  

Also I added pockets 

Which then immediately bagged out because - hips. So I had to sew them down, and they are mostly invisible, but initially I panicked a little.  Then, after all that drama, I forgot to take any proper photos, despite having identified the very sweetest spot in my house to take beautiful well, lit pictures...so I only have the ones I took with my phone. 

 

After making this dress, including the emergency trip to The Fabric Store for contrasting fabric as I ran out, and all the thinking that had to go along with it, I was severely unenthused.  I did think it would do for frocktails (and it did).  I wore it to work to get some reviews, and people like it, but I feel strange in it, like I'm trying to hard.  A friend of mine who is very picky messaged me that she wanted it, so I decided to wear it to frocktails then send it on to its new home.  This has all happened and everyone is happy.

However I had expected to really like the Axis dress, and in the end I would not make it again.