Splat dress!

Before I get started into my post I wanted to share a neat photo collection I stumbled upon, Christopher Payne's "Textiles" collection. The photos are so fascinating! I love seeing the technology that goes into the materials for my favourite past-time, and the colours in the photos are absolutely delicious. Doesn't this look like it should be cotton candy, not fabric??

Back to business! This was my last sewing with non-purpose dress of 2015, first and last! (Hopefully)

I had just walked into fabricland, saw this gorgeous stuff on sale for $3 a meter (!!!) and had to have it, even though I didn't really have a plan for it. My original idea for it was to make a long collared shirt-dress with the white border at the bottom. However, I had a friend who was feeling a bit down in the dumps so I asked his opinion to get his mind off things. He's very into minimalist and edgy fashion and I thought he'd really like the fabric. He was very adamant that it should be a simple shift dress, and while I wasn't super feeling it, I didn't want to totally override his creative input. I put a pleat into the front to make it more interesting.

I'm very glad I went with his advice! I'm in love with the way this dress turned out. I used the Staple Dress pattern from April Rhodes, with a few obvious adjustments. The most blaring: I didn't add the waist shirring. Another is I shortened the sleeves, and made the side edges more straight.

You'll also notice the neck hole is smaller. I wanted a high neckline in the design stage, and then for some reason completely forgot how to do that. So I pin it at the back! It makes a small pleat  at the back, and since there is one at the front it makes sense. I plan on getting a nifty brooch specifically for this purpose.

When I uploaded all the pictures, I noticed two thing:
1) This dress is a lot shorter than I thought (I have no full length mirrors in my apartment) and I will be wearing it with tights from now on.
2) My eyes are closed in almost every shot, my boyfriend is NOT a stellar photographer.

Without the pin in the back, this is what the dress looks like:

Thanks, boyfriend -_-

Another fun feature of the dress is I can wear it backwards!

I actually almost think I like it better this way, and I don't have to fiddle with a pin to get it to sit high on my neck.

I have also been playing with a new photo editor, so here I've added some palm trees to distract from the dirty snow on the ground: