The “Flip Side” Dress

The Facts

Fabric: a couple of meters of pink-and-blue floral craft cotton, $2/meter on sale at Spotlight
Pattern: Butterick 6619
Year: early 1970′s
Notions: bit of interfacing for the collar, and an invisible zip (~$6 on sale at Arthur Toye a while back)
Time to complete: 3.5 hours
First worn: for these photos, on a lovely summer evening walk
Wear again? yep
Total cost: about $10

Last week’s challenge on the Sew Weekly was ‘winter’. Lets face it – we’ve just started on summer down here, and winter gear is about the last thing I want to be making right now!

So, I decided to interpret it as ‘start of new season’, and make a summer dress instead. (Hence the name – the flip side of winter is summer.)

Drake helped me choose a pattern (aka sat on my lap while I showed him a few options and talked aloud while deciding which one I wanted to make). I found a dress in an op shop (thrift store) a while back, and it’s turned out to be perfect for breastfeeding as it does up down the centre front with a zip. Quick and easy access, just the way the little lad likes it (any slower than 2 seconds and he gets rather grumpy, so quick-and-easy access is a lot easier for me, and my eardrums, as well!). Hence why I decided to branch out of my 1940’s/50’s zone and tackle this pattern from the early 1970’s – it also has a centre-front zip.

It also has pockets. I love pockets on dresses. Every time I make a dress that doesn’t have pockets, I plan to put them in. (Most of the time I then get all excited about getting the skirt sewn up and forget to add in-seam pockets to it. Oops. But the plan is always there! Maybe I need to write myself a sign and stick it to the wall above my sewing machine, to remind myself….)

I must admit, it felt rather odd wearing this out and about. It’s so much shorter than what I usually wear, and when coupled with high heels I felt rather ‘dressed up’! (Strange how that works – if the dress was just a bit longer, or more of a 50’s siholuette rather than the more A-line 70’s style, I wouldn’t have felt ‘dressed up’ at all. *shrug*) I do like this dress though – it’s nice and lightweight, so it’ll be good to wear on warm days. And it’s sleeveless – I love having bare arms in summer. (I can also attest that the zip-front made Drake a rather happy lad. Or at least far less grumpy than button-up fronts do!)

The pattern itself was nice and easy to whip up – these 1970’s styles usually are, gotta love that. Steve is encouraging me to make more of these (only in different fabrics – the pink-and-blue floral got a big thumbs-down from anti-floral-boy), and I may just do that. It’ll be an easy style to adjust the side seams on as (if?) I lose the baby-weight, so it seems pretty much perfect as far as my wardrobe needs go right now.

We went wandering after dinner to take these photos, and ended up outside the zoo, so I got to pretend to interact with a tiger painting while people drove past….

Speaking of wardrobe needs, do you like my new shoes? I just “needed” to have them. 😉 I’m calling them my Christmas present to myself.