Dress commission

You may remember a while back, when I came back to blogging, that I posted about a dress that I made for the lady who sang at our wedding reception. The post is here, and the relevant part, with a picture of the dress, is at the bottom of the post.

©Wanderlust Photography

I don't have any photos that really show Louise in her tulip dress, but thought I'd post this one anyway.

We ran into Louise and her husband at a friend's wedding recently, and she was wearing her dress! I was really very happy to see that she's still enjoying it. She asked me if I'd be interested in sewing another, in fact, which I said I'd be happy to do for her. I enjoyed making her dress, and it really made me feel good to know that she wanted me to sew for her again.

I met up with Louise earlier this week to shop for fabric. It was fun, because we went to Dressew, which is a truly mad, wonderful, crazy place to shop. They don't have a website, but their Yelp page is full of glowing reviews. Anyway, since we had such great success using quilting cotton on the first dress, we went straight to that section of the store. There are those who think that quilting cottons are only suitable for quilts, and perhaps clothing for babies and toddlers, but I disagree. Quilting cottons are quite versatile, and can make for some lovely garments, depending on the weight of the fabric and the type of garment. Gertie wrote a post about it a while back, and brought up some very good points about the different schools of thought on the matter.

In the case of this particular dress, we chose quilting cotton because it has a bit of body to it, which makes the skirt stand out nicely. It's a full skirt, so you don't want a droopy, drapey fabric. Quilting cotton is also soft enough that the skirt remains "swishy", so the dress moves with her as she performs. Quilting cotton is comfortable - it gets hot under those stage lights. It doesn't chafe like synthetics can, which is a bonus if you're dancing under hot lights. Finally, it's easy to care for. That's a big bonus, especially if you are busy and don't have time to get your dress drycleaned in time for your next show.

Louise and I spent over an hour looking at fabrics. She was drawn to red, but already has a red dress, so we looked at other colours. We had a few criteria in mind... the prints had to be bold, so that they wouldn't disappear on stage, and the fabrics should show up against a curtain. We wanted her to stand out, not blend in with the drapes! The other criteria was that the fabrics should suit the vintage look of the dress. The tulips are a bit modern, but they're still a floral, which worked, because floral prints were common in the era this dress is from.

We had no luck with green, unfortunately, because all of the cooler shades of green were unsuitable prints. The warmer greens were too yellow for her skintone. Anything with large amounts of yellow was out of the question. She's not a big fan of purple, so we didn't really look there. We wanted to avoid black, because we want her to stand out on stage. Same goes for pretty much any dark blue. Finding just the right fabric was more challenging than you'd think, especially in a store that has hundreds of quilting cottons to choose from!

©Aspiring Threads

We ended up narrowing it down to three fabrics. One was a black fabric that had enough of a pattern on it that it wouldn't blend in with the background. I didn't get a photo of it, but I think I liked it better than Louise did, and I'll probably go back and buy some for myself. These are the two fabrics we found. The pink fabric is a Michael Miller fabric, so it was a bit on the expensive side, for a quilting cotton, but it will make a stunning dress. The blue and white was half the cost of the pink floral, so it balanced out. The fabrics are modern, but like the tulip fabric, are very workable for the style of the dress.

My next post will detail the modifications we made to the pattern, and my thoughts on working with this pattern.