Me-Made-May’15

April 30, 2015 by Ashley ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’m pretty excited to announce that I’ll be participating in Me-Made-May’15! What is Me-Made-May? It’s a challenge created by a wonderful sewing blogger, and you can read all about it here. I’ve already started sprucing up past makes in preparation!

Me-Made-May’15 is a bit of a custom challenge, in that each participant gets to define how often they’ll wear their garments. A no pressure, no stress challenge. How often am I doing it? Well, here’s my pledge:

“I, Ashley of Sewn By Ashley, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May ’15. I endeavor to wear at least two me-made garments each week for the duration of May 2015.”

Why only two? Well, a bit of my makes are winter or special occasion only, and I’m afraid I just don’t have enough garments yet to do it more often! All my upcoming projects are fairly complicated, so…those may be a little slow in coming. However, I’m looking forward to sharing some of my completed makes with you all!

The Anchor Dress

April 24, 2015April 24, 2015 by Ashley ♥ 6 Comments

At it again with the killer posing. I swear I don’t have that many wrinkles!!

So I know this is a super old pattern, but…I still think you should make this dress immediately. It’s the Butterick B5317 by Maggy London and it’s fantastic. The dress features six fairly large pleats, right underneath the bust, which makes it very flattering. The pattern calls for a side zip, but as I made mine in a knit, I omitted the zipper. However, I did notice that the bodice darts were a bit too pronounced, so perhaps such a sturdy knit was not the best fabric choice? The pictures don’t do the bust any justice, though, I’m the worst at pictures. Also, I ended up taking the straps up a few inches, and the bodice in a bit. Honestly, I have nearly constant strap issues. At this point, I’ve planned for it. By pattern sizing, I should have made a 14, but I scaled down to a 12. I think I could have done a 10.

Awkward ankles, weird shadows, and unfinished shoulder seams.

I opted out of doing a contrast fabric, frankly, I just didn’t have one and there are NO fabric stores where I work or where I live. It’s only a thirty minute drive to Joann, but still…no time. Also, since I didn’t do a contrast band on the bottom, I decided to try out a rolled hem. ROLLED HEMS ARE THE BEST!! Once I figured out how to set up my trusty serger for this, it was beyond easy. I usually serge all my seams, so I’ve come to expect setup difficulties, but here there were none! Success on the first try!

All and all, this dress came together in about three evenings, from start to finish. Around six hours, I think, including fit issues. I’ll actually get some wear out of it, and truly, the fit isn’t that bad. Also, shout out to Etsy and my momma for my awesome Harry Potter locket 🙂

Happy sewing!

Throwback to the “Va Va Voom” Dress

April 9, 2015April 21, 2015 by Ashley ♥ 6 Comments

As you can tell by my limited amount on posts, I haven’t been blogging for very long! Since I’m busy this week doing lots and lots of mending, I thought I’d share one of my favorite pre-blog makes.

"Sewn by Ashley: a history of bad posing" — “Sewn by Ashley: a history of bad posing”

I love this dress. I mean really love. I’d sewn this dress with Amy from That’s Sew Amy. From cutting the fabric to finishing the dress, we got both of our dresses done in one day!! Now that’s a win! Not to mention, we were sewing these from the Frankenpattern contest., so there was a decent bit of “winging it”. I think sewing with others is just so much easier, don’t you? I find fitting and working out pattern issues are much less problematic!

So my version of this dress was a mixture of Simplicity 1426 and Gertie’s Pencil Skirt. To combine the two, I made the pencil skirt but omitted the waistband, and just added to the width of the bottom band for the top. Then I added a center back zipper to hold it all together. Easy peasy. I did size down the top, if you follow the pattern guides, I’ve found the top to be too loose not at all like the pattern cover.

I made this one out of a patterned stretch twill, which was fantastic to work with, and black gabardine, which I had purchased by accident. The gabardine was just meh to work with. This being the first time I’ve used it, though, it may have just been the wrong material for this project. Still turned out what I think is fabulous dress, which I am still trying to find a reason to wear!

Back with a peplum

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 by Ashley ♥ 12 Comments

Holy hiatus!!!!! My apologies for my absence, life has been very crazy lately. But we’re settling back into normalcy now, and spring is here (aka sewing season). It doesn’t hurt that my mentor started a sewing bloggers group on Facebook this week,either. So…about the sewing. I’m in love with the Simplicity 1425. I stretched it out over three days of lazy sewing, but it could easily have been completed in one day. That’s including all the alterations I made. I will absolutely being sewing this one again.

Speaking of the some alterations, let’s get down to that. I cut the lace for view E, and cut the black lining for view B. To be blunt, I just love a bit of cleavage. For the pleats, I decided to sew the lace and black cotton together, so as to not have an overly poofy peplum (almost like an underlining). NOW, Simplicity calls for three buttons to hold this bad boy together. THREE! Fuck that noise, I have no faith in buttons to keep me from being naked in public. Based on what I saw seemingly every other sewist do, I decided to do an exposed separating zipper in the back. This baby is secure. The neckline is just serged, and will be eventually treated with bias tape. My lace has a scalloped edge, so I left that as is. I feel like all this black needs that touch of femininity, ya know?

Seriously, what am I supposed to do with my hands?

Buying fabric in my area is a sad, sad endeavor. It’s basically Joann’s or Hancock. Also, I’m just absurdly cheap. I’m telling you this to justify making this top from the cheapest quilting cotton in my stash, and lace leftover from a previous project. Despite all of that, I like the way this top came out. Admittedly, I need to do some fitting here. There’s puckering in the back needs love, and the waist needs to be a bit more fitted. Give this pattern a go, I’m sure you’ll love it!