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.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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