I'm back!

So, I seem to have taken a bit of an unintentional blogging sabbatical for the last 5 or so months - seems like planning a wedding takes up a lot more of my free time than I thought! Even though I haven't been blogging, I have been quite busy crafting and sewing. If you follow me on Twitter  or Instagram you may have spotted a few of the things I have created over the last few months, as well as quite a few sneak peaks of the wedding prep!

There's so much to catch up on - recent makes, a rather belated summary of 12 in 2012 (!), wedding planning and related sewing, honeymoon sewing plans…so I had better stop chatting and get on with it!

Let's start this off with a really quick jersey dress that I whipped up towards the end of last Summer. This is the PERFECT quick-fix when you really want to get that satisfaction of making something, but just don't have the time, or the energy that a 'regular' dress from a pattern would take.  

I contemplated making a tutorial for the dress, but to be honest there really is so little to it that it would take far longer to photograph and make diagrams for a tutorial than it would to actually just make this dress!!! Here is a really quick summary anyway, incase you fancy giving it a go yourself:

You need:

- About 1m quite wide jersey fabric (at least as wide as you want the dress length to be)

- Elastic thread

- Regular sewing thread

 Instructions:

- Making one selvedge as your hem (cuts down on the sewing!) measure how long you would like your dress - trim to size.

- Sew small hem along top edge of fabric

- The next part you can do 2 possible ways - either sew your fabric into a giant tube (the full meter, or meter and a half, etc - whatever works best for your size) and then shirr (with the elastic thread hand wound around your bobbin - Google it if you haven't tried shirring before, it's very easy, and very satisfying!) the top section in a continuous loop until you get to about just under your bust. OR - Make enough rows of shirring at the top of your fabric until you have enough to cover your bust, and then sew your fabric into a 'tube'.

- With the fabric you cut off at the beginning make a plait (cut into three strips and plait together). Knot either end. You have a belt!

- If you are blessed with a larger bust than me (not hard!) then you might want to make straps or a halter neck. Again, you could use any excess fabric and plait it and then sew in place. 

DONE! 

 

 As I said, super fast and easy! I recon this would make a really quick and comfortable maternity dress as well - you could either forgo the belt, or tie it just below the bust for an 'Empire Line' style dress.

Sigh- how I wish it was warm enough to wear this dress at the moment. I'm pretty much done with this cold weather now thank you very much! These photos were taken at Lough Erne Yacht Club (N.I.) where my fiancé's family have a caravan (and boat), and where I spend a lot of my weekends during the warmer months of the year.

 I splurged out recently and bought an iMac computer, so I'm not quite sure what my post will look like as I'm writing it in 'Mars Edit' (an annoying thing I discovered post buying my computer was that Window Live Writer doesn't have a compatible version for the Mac - grrr!) - so please excuse me if this post looks odd. I'm also working on improving my photography, and how photos are displayed on the blog, so again - I hope this transfers properly to Blogger! We shall see when I hit the 'publish' button I suppose! (If you have seen this post twice it's because I'm trying to sort out the photos!!)