Using Liberty Tana Lawn to Sew a Vintage Dress Pattern

This is a quick make from a vintage pattern that has been in my stash for a couple years. I wanted something quick before I get into another long haul embroidery project, and this one seemed like a perfect quick sew. Not entirely sure if it is supposed to be a nightie or a dress pattern, and I was a little worried it would just end up looking like a potato sack tied up with ribbon, but in the end I am very happy with this. It is made from a vintage Anne Adams pattern that I found on Etsy. I made the ties out of the same fabric as the dress and then added a bow at the neckline to cinch it in for better coverage (it was gaping a little without this, as the neckline is cut on the bias). I used lace for the neckline tie and bow and even though it makes this lean more towards looking like pyjamas I still love the look! Lace gives such a romantic look. The fabric I used is a Tana Lawn from Liberty and the lace is from Fine French Laces. I haven’t really felt inspired to start making winter clothes yet, so I think I am just going to carry on with summer dresses and admire them in my closet until next summer comes.

The side seams are just straight french seams, and then pretty much everything else is just finished with a narrow hem. I chose to hand sew all the narrow hems and then I also hand stitched the casing for the lace bow around the neckline. The fabric is Liberty of London Tana Lawn, which is a very lightweight but still crisp cotton fabric, I used the Sufyan pattern in green. You can get the fabric here: Liberty London

The lace I used for the neckline is one I ordered online from a shop called Fine French Laces (www.cottonlace.com) and I think it suits the dress perfectly. I can’t seem to find the exact lace I used on the website but it was an ecru coloured lace under their rare lace category, and it is about 2 cm thick. They have lot’s of similar ones currently available though!

And of course the pattern is vintage so I don’t have an exact link to where you can buy it, but my favourite place to look for vintage sewing patterns is Etsy.

Wedding Dress Part 1: Planning, Mock-up, and Embroidery Samples

Sewing a wedding dress seems like it ought to be the culmination of my sewing career, although I do hope that’s not the case, I hope there’s some more fantastic projects in my future. The wedding dress just feels different because, when will I have a chance to wear something like this again? This is a big one, and it might be my most exciting make for the next little while.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m approaching this in a very thought-out and well-planned way. Mainly because that’s just me, I don’t tend to ‘wing it’. But also: because I don’t really feel confident sewing with such delicate (and expensive!) fabric, I’ve never actually made a full-length dress, and I really want this one to fit me well. For everyday wear I think a more casual fit is nice, but for my wedding dress? I want this one to fit me like a glove, perfectly tailored. So I’ve actually spent about a month now doing the set-up for this dress. I found a sewing pattern that I fell in love with, the Lune Dress from French Poetry. And you can probably tell from all my recent makes that I need to incorporate embroidery into this, so I decided to do a sheer embroidered overlay or overdress. A vision of this was starting to form in my head.

So a couple things to work out. Will this pattern sew up like I’m imagining? What fabrics am I going to use for the dress, and for the sheer overlay? And lastly, what am I going to embroider on it?

I started with a mock-up or a test run of the Lune Dress pattern. I sewed the mock-up in a lightweight cotton with a tulle overlay, because I already had the cotton in my stash and the tulle cost only a couple dollars a meter. The tulle actually was in the running for the final fabric, but more on that later. The pattern is just incredible, it was so easy to sew up, and not only are the instructions great but there is also a ‘sew-along’ video for it on the French Poetry website. I did have to make a couple changes to make the overlay work, and it was really helpful just to practice all the steps and make my own notes on what helped me. I feel really confident sewing the final dress now that I’ve already gone through the steps once. The fit was pretty good too. I forgot  to take a picture of the ‘before’ fit but basically I just had to take out the waist a little at the side seams, shorten the shoulders, make the dress longer, and then tweak a small fit issue at the centre front.  

As for my fabric choices, I chose an off-white silk charmeuse as the underdress. A silk habotai light weight (8mm) silk for the dress lining. And for the overdress I was torn between the tulle I used on the mock-up and a silk organza. I love how sheer the tulle is, but I honestly struggled a bit working with it on the mock-up. It was so slippery and so hard to see what I was cutting, and the one I was using was very weak! It even ripped a little when I was trying on the mock-up, which really wouldn’t work for hugging and dancing and just the general merriment one does on their wedding day. So I started considering a silk organza I had in my stash. It seemed like it might be too stiff, it just didn’t have the same drape as the tulle, but it is such a beautiful fabric, and it is very strong too. So I decided to do an embroidery swatch on both fabrics. 

These swatches gave me the chance to practice the type of embroidery I want to do on the dress, and I got to see how each embroidered sheer fabric would look overtop the silk charmeuse. This process sold me on the silk organza, it was just so much more enjoyable to work with, and I was more excited when I held it in my hands. As for the drape, I spent some time googling silk organza dresses and wedding dresses, and I found lots of beautiful examples. I think as long as the fabric is cut the right way then it will drape in a nice feminine way. There are of course a lot of seamstresses who make very boxy garments with organza, but I don’t think with the pattern I’m using it will be boxy at all.

And my embroidery turned out exactly as I hoped. Lots of floral and botanical elements and then the beaded starbursts just make me so happy. It’s all enjoyable to stitch and not too time consuming (which is very important, considering this dress has a deadline!).

So that’s pretty much where I am now. I feel really confident to power ahead on the final dress. I am going to be hand stitching the entire thing because the thought of putting these fabrics anywhere near my machine just stresses me out. I’ve never had luck sewing fabrics like this and I would just much rather turn on some music and stitch away by hand. In fact I’ve been following a couple hand sewing teachers lately and have really been preferring that process. I bought myself an instructional book called Hand Sewing Clothing: A Guide by Louisa Owen Sonstroem so that I would have as many tips and tricks before I really got started on this dress. So this week I will be working on thread tracing all my pattern pieces. This is essentially drawing the pattern pieces onto your fabric using basting stitches. I always do this anyways for embroidered panels but for this project I’m going to try it for all the pattern pieces. It will make for some very precise sewing. Then I need to plan all my embroidery pattern arrangements for each pattern piece, and then it’ll be onto the mammoth portion of this project: the embroidery! 

Supplies and resources I’m using so far:

• Lune Dress pattern from French Poetry

• Hand Sewing Clothing: A Guide by Louisa Owen Sonstroem

• Silk Charmeuse fabric from Rokko Fabrics

• Silk Organza fabric from Maiwa

• Silk Habotai 8mm lining fabric from Maiwa

• DMC Six-Strand Embroidery Floss

• Beads are from Beadworks on Granville Island

100 Days of Stitching Birds

I just finished embroidering 100 birds onto a thrifted linen dress. Spread out over 100 days, this was my bird-a-day project. This project became a little more consuming than I anticipated, with each bird taking anywhere from 1-3 hours to stitch. You’d think doing this sort of practice each day might make me quicker, but I don’t think it did. Although I do think my decision making muscles have improved. In the beginning I would spend so much time deciding exactly where each bird should live, and next to whom, but in the last month I find I can decide what to work on each day in seconds. 

I found this linen shift dress at my local thrift store, and what a find! It’s really well made, the fabric is just perfect for embroidery, and it felt like a blank canvas just waiting to be decorated. I did of course have to do a little bit of work on the dress before I got started (I find that just about everything I thrift needs some love). I un-did the alterations that the previous owner had made to the dress (they took it in at the waist), and then I wore it a couple days to see what needed to be done. The buttons go all the way down the back of the dress, and I found when I walked they would pop open. This would not do! So I hand-stitched that seam closed so the buttons basically are just for looks now, which feels much more secure. I also shortened the dress an inch or two, replaced a couple missing buttons, and added a waist tie. I love adding waist ties to my thrift finds, it helps give me that hourglass shape without making any time-consuming and more permanent alterations to the clothes. Now that the dress was perfect for me in terms of structure, I could start to think about decoration.

The pattern book I used is a Japanese craft book I found on Etsy. I’ll link to the shop I ordered it from at the bottom of this post. I don’t read or speak Japanese, but the pictures are all I really need. And the odd time I needed a little more help I just used Google Translate, so handy!

I used my go-to thread (dmc cotton embroidery floss) and started stitching birds in no particular order. I do try to keep themed birds in roughly the same area on the dress. There is a scene of penguins hanging out near the hem and I just love how they look all together. But I try not to stress too much about getting them all in the perfect spot. I’m so happy with how it looks at this point, the birds are small enough that you can barely tell what they are unless you’re right next to me, which gives it a more delicate and whimsical feel. It’s not too flashy.

There are still a lot of empty spaces though! I could definitely see myself adding another 100 birds, maybe a sequel challenge for later in the year. For now I have an upcoming deadline for a very important project, my wedding dress! So I will take a step back from the birds for now, and see if I can whip up a wedding dress by April. Wish me luck!

Little Bird Embroidery: I bought my copy here

Botanical Embroidered Myosotis Dress

Just a quick post here to catalogue a make from last September, the Myosotis Dress from Deer and Doe Patterns. I’ll link to the supplies I used at the bottom of this post. I am so so happy with how this turned out (no mods were made to the pattern), it was made to be a fun party dress and that’s exactly what it feels like when I wear it. It is also nearly all hand finished, the inside is almost as beautiful as the outside. The gathers are even hand-sewn stroke gathers, which to me is a much more enjoyable process than machine sewn gathers, even though it does take longer. Enjoy these photos and then check out some of the linked resources!

Fabric: Laundered Linen in Vintage Rose colour from Maiwa

Pattern: Myosotis Dress from Deer and Doe Patterns

Embroidery Pattern: Embroidered Botanicals book by Yumiko Higuchi

Hand-sewn gathers: recently learned in a class from Sewn Stories

Wool thread: Crewel Wool Thread from Appleton’s Wool

Cotton thread: cotton 6-strand embroidery floss from dmc embroidery

Sewing a Nightshirt from a Thrifted Texmade Ibex Bedsheet

Since I've started obsessively thrifting I have a new joy for sewing and embroidery. This was my first full circle project that started with me getting giddy in a thrift store about a Texmade Ibex bed sheet that brought me right back to my childhood. I love that feeling of nostalgia I get in thrift stores, but the sheet had so many holes and stains that I just enjoyed the memories that seeing it brought me, and then carried on my way. As I worked my way through the rest of the thrift store I just could not stop thinking about it. When I was younger my siblings and I had these same flannel bedsheets (in a different colour way) and we also had matching pyjamas made out of the same striped flannel. On top of that my teddy bear even had matching pyjamas! So when I got the idea to turn this damaged sheet into an adult version of those pyjamas I basically ran back to the linen department of the thrift store to scoop it up.

This nightshirt wasn't exactly on my list of things to make for the upcoming season, or for my home, but it was just such a fun idea in my head that it got bumped to the front of my project queue and I've been working on it almost non-stop for the last month. I wanted to make it really special with some embroidery on the front pocket and the edges finished with the same blanket stitch that the sheet edges are finished with. I'm using a vintage sewing pattern here that I found on Etsy: Butterick 6885. It's a unisex pattern for a nightshirt and pants. After cutting out the pieces for the nightshirt it looks like I might have enough leftover to make some shorts, but anyways that will be a later project, I usually just sleep in a nightshirt anyways.

For the pocket piece I cut it in a way that would be mostly blank fabric with just a bit of the stripe running along the top. I needed a blank canvas for the embroidery but I still wanted it to tie in nicely with the stripes on the shirt. I used an embroidery pattern by Sarah K. Benning called Summer Flowers. It's not available currently on her website but a couple times a year she will do a re-release of all her old embroidery patterns. It was a pretty fiddly embroidery pattern but my main frustration with it was that I just could not get the pattern transferred onto the fabric. Usually to transfer patterns I just trace them with pencil or use some graphite transfer paper, but the flannel was too fluffy for this and it was so hard to get even the most basic shape of the flowers down. So basically I ended up just eyeballing it flower by flower which worked well enough. Next time I work with flannel I'm going to buy some of that paper that you print the pattern onto, embroider, and then it dissolves away in water. There was also a lot of outlining on this pattern but I actually loved that and found it very relaxing.

Once I had the embroidery done I could cut out the pocket piece and start assembling the night shirt. Attaching the pocket is the first step of the pattern so I couldn't start the until the embroidery was done. The shirt came together very fast, only slowed down by the fact that I wanted to do so much hand-stitching on it. I used a closed blanket stitch to attach the pocket and hem the bottom of the shirt, and I used chain stitch around the collar and the sleeve cuffs. I am so happy with this nightshirt, it almost feels too beautiful to wear to bed.

Making this just really made me so enthusiastic about all the possibilities there are when it comes to thrifting. I would have never thought to make something like this if I hadn't seen the sheet and got the inspiration from that first. Another section in the thrift store that I've been getting a lot of inspiration from is the table linens. There are often such beautiful hand embroidered napkins and tablecloths. Sometimes stained from years of families gathering and enjoying meals, but if cut the right way could be made into summer dresses, camisoles (something like my Wattlebird Cami), and baby clothes. Anyways, now back to my list of things I would actually like to have done by summer! I would like to sew a couple more lightweight summer dresses and I have a wedding dress I need to start planning as well!

Some more posts for you to check out: