sarah in nyc

The ruffle fabric in my stash was calling to me. I knew I wanted to make a dress out of it. I knew exactly the dress I wanted to make. I wanted to make a tank dress with an arch shaped godet. Yes, you have seen me make this dress before, over and over. This ruffle fabric has so much going on you just don’t want to do a whole lot to it. It’s also a fabric of the season. By next year it will look so “Summer of 2012” that you wouldn’t want to wear it. We are going to the theatre tomorrow night, so I will wear it out then. Here is a close-up of the godet. This fabric is so easy to sew, you can understand why it is being featured so often in ready to wear. I did hem the neckline and the armscye, but I could have gotten away with raw edges. I didn’t hem the bottom, it wasn’t worth the effort. How long did making this dress take??? About 20 minutes. My cost ? about $7. I also made a quickie shrug out of some of the scraps. Making this sort of a garment is like retail therapy wit...

My sewing student brought me one of those adorable craft books from Japan with directions for making cute little stuffed animals. She really wanted to make one of the animals from the book. Before we started, I mentioned to my student that sometimes the directions in books are not written all that well.  So we got to work. Indeed, the directions in the book were not written well, and the project wasn’t all that well thought out. Making this monkey was just much harder then it ought to have been.  All in all, it was a pretty frustrating experience. But this was the end result.  My student designed the dress because she hated what the monkey’s legs looked like. My student came today for her last lesson before she went away for the summer.  She asked that we make something that could be completed today. I suggested a skirt.  My student was dubious that a skirt could be made in one lesson. My student went looking through my stash to choose a fabric for...