Epirus

I love this dress. It is as comfortable and cool as my Lapis Lazuli dress and wasted a lot less fabric (I have two tiny little strips from where I cut the selvedges off). This took me less than a day from marking out the lines on my fabric to cutting the pieces out and sewing them together. I used a bowl to mark out the neckline and cut the whole thing out of two layers of jersey (you can make that neckline indentation with anything that has a V-shaped spout but I lacked such a utensil so I folded it in half and winged it)*. I then used the inner layer to line and face the dress and machine-wash-dyed the fabric (from duck-egg blue) to pistachio green using some yellow poly idye.

The rest of the day, (and the next morning) was spent block printing the yoke (which I roughly delineated with sticky tape) and the hem. I used Pebeo paints for the outlines and Jacquard dyes as fillers. I’ve left the hem unfinished because I like the drape and subtle scalloped appearance of the two layers of fabric.

I went a little overboard with the yoke because I wanted to test all the new colours I bought recently, so I tried all sorts of different combinations and mixes. I reckon the dark green- maroon combination is the best. I also need to give some of the seams a once-over, the dye bath obviously didn’t go easy on them.

Pattern(less pattern): ROM 969.3.1, 22: Woman’s sleeveless dress from the fabulous Cut my Cote (reviewed here).

Fabric: Fine duck-egg Modal jersey dyed with yellow idye poly (in a front loading washing machine-this is as bright as it gets).

Modifications: Reduced panels to 32 cm (the original was 40.5 cm) and shortened the whole thing to the length of my Lapis Lazuli dress.

Used two layers of fabric with the inner layer functioning as both lining and neckline facing.

Patterned 3-D microfibre tights by Fiore.

* The neckline is perfectly bilaterally symmetrical-it’s just folded over in these pics.

Other cool makes from this book here, here and here (‘guffets out of the bofom’ indeed). And if you’re crushing on ye olde (or vintage/ antique) fashion check out the fabulous and well-researched American Age Fashion for your design and history fix (makes for a good dose of the intellectual in your reader as well).

Disclaimer: All non-self-generated images remain copyright of the Royal Ontario Museum and are reproduced here with permission.