Hi everyone !
Let me introduce you to Maple, my new little yellow dress. This is a loose fit dress, double breasted with a tailored collar, ¾ sleeves and pockets. I find it amazing!
The Maple pattern
The pattern is from CocoWawa Crafts, an independent pattern company founded by Ana, a Spanish sewing pattern designer based in London. I actually bought the pattern directly from her during her pop-up shop at the Village Haberdashery store in West Hampstead. It was a pleasure to meet her! She creates very nice pattern, very feminine with a little touch of vintage but not too much. This is the first pattern I bought from her and I love it. Check out her website: https://www.cocowawacrafts.com/
I bought the pattern in a paper format, but the instructions were provided in PDF by email. At the beginning I thought that it would bother me, but actually it was fine, I followed the instructions from my mobile during the sewing. I understand that it makes savings on paper and the price of the pattern is lower as a consequence, which I think is nice.
The yellow ochre fabric
I bought the fabric on Sew me sunshine website. It’s a yellow ochre cotton-linen blend, and it is lovely to wear and sew. I only had 1.65m of this fabric so it was very very tight to cut all the pieces…firstly, I resigned myself to making the short version, although I wanted to make the long one. Then in order to save the main fabric, I used another fabric for invisible parts like the back facing, the pockets and the under collar. This is a cotton lawn I used for a Sew Over It Eve dress last year (I bought it on Fabric Godmother website).
In the end I am very happy with this dress in this fabric! I highly recommend Sew me sunshine, they have a nice selection in terms of colours and materials. Their website: https://sewmesunshine.co.uk/
Sewing Maple
The sewing instructions were clear, especially the collar part. I used the Youtube video as a complementary help when I wasn’t sure about some parts…in fact the booklet indicates the part of the video that you need to look at, so this is quite useful, instead of watching the whole video!
I’m just going to do one modification to the dress: I like the fact that it’s loose fit, but it’s a little bit too much for me so I’m going to add an elastic band at the back.
The Maple dress in pictures
A special dress
Now, this dress is a bit special because I cut it at home in London and sewed it at my parents in Normandy using my mother’s sewing machine, which I started sewing with. This Singer is 26 years old and still works fine!
During my time in Normandy, I discovered the dress form my maternal grand-mother, Lucette, used for her sewing diploma. A dress form with such a tiny waist…
This is my grand mother Lucette when she was young…wasn’t she elegant?
I also learnt that my great grand-mother, Germaine, on my father side, was a seamstress too! So I had seamstresses on both sides. I don’t have a picture at hand unfortunately.
Another detail: the pictures were taken the day I had a make-up trial for my wedding, which is why I’ve got nice make-up and wearing lovely earrings (Lucette’s earrings actually).
What about you? Do you associate a make to special moments in your life? Do you remember the exact circumstances surrounding your makes?
