I am totally blogging things out of order! That’s my prerogative as this is my blog :)
Today I share with you a Tunic Dress that I have made using Blackbird Fabrics Lightweight Washed Linen. This linen is just so lovely and soft and has that lived in wonderful feeling of linen that has been worn and loved.
The base pattern for this dress is the Style Arc Daisy Designer Tunic. Although, I must tell you that I have made MANY alterations to this pattern. There is a long story behind this and it all stems back to my now rescheduled Morocco trip and the fact that I wanted a good base woven tunic top.
As with the rest of the world so many plans, activities and normal day to day things have drastically changed over the past 5 months that it is sometimes a bit hard to even take stock of it all! I feel like I have come to terms with the changes, for the most part anyway. And like my adjusting of life to the new normal, my sewing plans also had to adjust. Instead of planning, designing and making clothing for events and outings, I have made the slow adjustment to designing, planning and creating clothes that just make me happy and take me down a creative route that I just want to explore.
That’s where this dress comes in. It all started with me playing on the Procreate drawing app on my iPad. I have been playing around with the app and slowly working through a UDEMY course on Procreate. I decided to design a whole bunch of different styles and types of tunics. All based off the basic Daisy Designer Tunic Pattern and sketched over my croqui. I had already made the muslins and made several changes to the pattern to make it fit exactly how I wanted so I knew that now I could take that base pattern and make any changes to it that I want.
One of those sketches that I made was for this tunic dress. I also used fabric in the sketch that I already have in my collection, this is a great way for me to play and visualize and if I really like the sketch I know I have the fabric at hand.
This is a sleeveless pull on dress with a contrasting rolled collar and hem band. It has a bit of a cocoon shape (also a design element that I have been exploring through sketching for a long time now) and of course pockets.
This was something that I knew I wanted to make immediately! I fell in love :)
Popping on the original muslin that I made earlier this year of the pattern I did some measuring and decided on length and neckline depth. I traced off a copy of my now Master Tunic pattern and lengthened and reshaped it slightly and drafted the large rolled collar. I constructed the entire dress except for the collar. This I first made out of muslin and basted onto the dress to see how it looked. Once I was happy with it I cut it out of fashion fabric and finished up the dress.
I have been having fun adding in labels from Kylie and The Machine. I have my own labels with Siouxzeegirl Designs woven on them but the Kylie labels are just fun and make me smile when I use them.
This linen is so lovely and lightweight but the deep hem facings give the bottom just enough weight for this dress to hang properly.
The fabric and the cut make this dress a real pleasure to wear and because I designed it off a master pattern the construction was a breeze and I knew the fit would be really darn close to spot on. If this had been a fitted garment then I would have made a new muslin to test but for a wonderfully loose and cool summer dress I decided to forgo the new muslin, except for the collar as described above.
I also made a matching face mask. I think it is really important for the safety of everyone to be responsible and wear a face mask when outside of the home. It has been proven to be effective and it is such a small inconvenience to help keep everyone safe. It only takes a few minutes to make them so adding matching ones for my garments is easy and fun. I always get lots of thumbs up and fun compliments from strangers when I wear matching masks to my garments.
I still have more ideas sketched out for other garments to make based off this new master pattern. This is actually my third… I haven’t blogged the other 2 yet but you may have seen them on my IG account.
It sure has been fun exploring different ideas and taking my sewing in a different direction that’s what I normally do.
Has the pandemic changed how you sew?
Happy Sewing!!
