Sewing: Eiffel Dress

As you may know, I’ve got into sewing big time recently. It took me a while to make my first dress (which I haven’t yet worn on the blog), but I’m now able to trace out a pattern and knock up a dress lazily over a couple of days – if I really wanted to, I think I could do it in a day now! My favourite one I’ve made so far has been my tartan shift dress from the Great British Sewing Bee book – I’ve already worn it several times and it hasn’t fallen apart yet! There’s a full skirted version of it too which uses the same bodice but with sleeves and a full skirt, and I’ve made that with gingham fabric (coming soon to the blog!). A couple of weekends ago I wanted to sew something, but I didn’t want to have too much faffing around starting something entirely new and needing to trace out a pattern, so I pulled out my shift dress one again along with this Eiffel Tower fabric that I got for £5/m off a little fabric stall I came across in York. I’d also picked up some black bias binding in Hobbycraft since I love the look of it when it’s exposed on necklines and armholes, and gave that a good go for the first time. Since I’d already made the pattern once for this and once for the full skirted version, it was a little bit easier, and turned out really well I think! Ben says it’s his favourite of the dresses I’ve made, while I still prefer my tartan one. I was really impressed with my bias binding since it came out really neatly in the end, and even though it’s fiddly in places, I think I’ll definitely do it again.
Unfortunately while the fabric is kind of awesome with its Eiffel Tower print, it’s not the greatest quality ever because it goes super creasy very quickly! I wore the dress at work for the day and ended up with all the creases you can see here across the hips and thighs where I was sitting – never mind!


As usual, I’ve been pretty busy doing all sorts of random things! As I said on Twitter today, despite seemingly doing a thousand things with my life, including full time work, running various blogs and social media accounts, choir (we have a concert this weekend that I’m doing the soprano solo for!), Brownies and sewing, I always want to do more. So I’ve now decided I’m going to write an eBook – it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, but something I’ve considered for a while. I suddenly hit on a topic in my head, and during my drive home from work I had the outline of it planned out in my head. I’m 1200 words into the introduction now and have the skeleton of it prepared, so let’s see how that goes! In other news, we’re still on the house hunt, but things are moving forward a little bit right now. I’m not going to go into detail yet because, of course, things may not move any further ahead, but it means I’ve got even more on my plate right now!
I had a lovely weekend too. It was my cousin Mollie’s fourth birthday (remember when she was only a month old?!) on Friday so we went round to them with my family and spent the evening playing with her and 18 month old Eva – it consisted of a lot of Frozen, a lot…not that I’m complaining, but I’m not sure how everyone else felt about that! Then it was my sister’s birthday on Saturday, so I went to their house that morning and spent the day with my family over at Whitby and Sandsend – we walked on the beach, ate waffles and played the 2p machines in the amusements (again!), and it was lovely. Ben joined us in the evening to go out for a meal at a local pub – I ended up eating a “Yorkshire Hotpot” which was a giant Yorkshire pudding filled with beef and gravy and topped with potatoes – it was as awesome as it sounds!