Really, Really Fast Dresses

I know I tend to make clothing quickly. Recently though I have rediscovered a cut of dress that I used to wear in my early 20’s.

The wedge shaped dresses of the early 1980’s were made for my body. While I am a whole lot heavier than I was in those days, my body is more or less the same shape.

I have noticed both on other sewing blogs as well as on the fashion blogs that those simple dress shapes have returned. Last year I had gone to an exhibit at FIT about Japanese fashion and those simple shapes popularized by the Japanese designers in the early 1980’s suddenly looked both fresh and grown up.

I also realize that while I crave screaming bright colors in the summer, the colder months have me craving grey. Grey! It’s so cheerful! It’s my cold weather happy color. Much of my colder weather wardrobe has been worn to death. It was time to make cold weather clothing.

This space dyed knit, made out of a mystery fiber, was my first experiment in a wedge shaped dress. This knit has a great drape, and I promise you it looks much better on me than it does on my dummy. I suppose it’s because I don’t have flocked skin like my dummy does. Trust me, this is a great dress that gets me compliments each time I wear it. I cut the shoulder line on a fold so all I had to do was sew up the side seams and finish off the hems. From cutting to finishing it took about 15 minutes.

So then I pulled yet another happy grey knit out of my stash. This was a beefy bottom weight knit ribbed on one side and smooth on the other. The fabric came from Fabric Mart several seasons back.

This time I sloped the shoulder line meaning that I had four seams to sew. Once again, from cutting to wearing took about 15 minutes.

I made those dresses a couple of weeks ago and I have worn them both a whole lot.

Today, I was in the garment district and decided that I really needed to buy one of the wonderful wool sweater knits that Kabbala Man was selling. I had fallen in love with the over-dyed prints this summer but could not deal with buying the wool during the heat of the summer. At $7.99/yard this was a bit of a splurge for me but paisley! ( another winter favorite) and grey!. So now I have the dress I’m wearing to thanksgiving in Brooklyn . I am actually going to make a nicer hem so the total time taken to make this dress will come closer to 30 minutes

Here is a close up of the sweater knit. So pretty, no?

I’m including a cutting diagram for making these dresses.

Your body does most of the work shaping the dress. You make the dress smaller than hip width because it’s a knit and that way it shows off your shape a bit. If your knit has less stretch, add more hip ease, if it is stretchier, add more ease.

So, for an investment of about $25 and 45 minutes, I have three dresses and enough left over to make other garments.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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