Hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas! I’ve been really lucky since I’ve been off since the 23rd, and we’re not back at work for another whole week. I’ll talk more about Christmas in another post (I’ve got a Me Made Christmas dress to show you!), but I spent most of Christmas at home with my family and had a lovely time. Obviously though, with all the days I’ve had off, I’ve had quite a bit of spare time too.
Just before Christmas, I decided to order myself a new dress pattern, since I’ve been repeating my Great British Sewing Bee one pretty much exclusively recently (in tartan, gingham and an Eiffel Tower print) – I’ve seen Simplicity 2444 being done a lot on sewing blogs and it looked like quite a versatile pattern, so picked that one, despite it not looking amazing on the packet! It has the option of no sleeves, short sleeves or three quarter length, as well as no collar, a standing collar and a cape collar, so I had plenty to choose from! I’d picked up two different fabrics from a Fletchers Fabrics at Clifton Moor near York, so I decided to put this navy Lighthouse print one to good use in this dress! I already knew I wanted to do the longer sleeve option, since I hadn’t yet tried sewing those, and the 3m of fabric I’d bought was just enough to cover that. It was actually a fairly easy to pattern to put together in the end, and has a few nice details, some of which I hadn’t attempted before including pockets, which were not difficult at all! I’m really pleased with how it turned out – it has double darts in the front, pleats in the skirt and I went for the no collar option and hemmed the skirt quite widely so it ended up a flattering knee length.
It took me only an afternoon and a morning from start to finish with the dress, from cutting out the pattern pieces to sewing it all together. I sewed a size 10 in the end after a bit of deliberation – I don’t fit conventional measurements very easily as I have a fairly extreme bust to waist ratio, and I’m often too lazy to do a full bust adjustment!! Fortunately, although it could probably do with a full bust adjustment, it fits really well.
I wore the dress yesterday evening as my parents came round for curry (homemade vindaloo, yums!), and I like to think that they were impressed. I got up this morning and decided I wanted to wear it again. The weather was also pretty awesome this morning – there was a very hard frost overnight and everything was covered in a thick layer of ice. In fact, our lane is still covered in ice and everything still in shade is frosty! So I thought it would be a perfect time to do some more interesting blog photos. I drove just up the road to get some pictures in a slightly different place and was very pleased with how these came out, even if they are slightly more artsy than proper outfit photos! The sun was reflecting like crazy off the ice, so it was either full sunlight on me (*squints*) or cool hazy pictures – you’ve got a bit of both here, but I tried to pick a few where you can see the dress itself too.
The hat was one of the items I bought when we went to Bakewell over summer from Mister Bee Vintage. I haven’t had the chance to wear it properly yet, but I really should. I think it actually looks a lot better with my short hair than it did with long hair, so hopefully I’ll have more opportunities to wear it now. Speaking of hair, it’s still feeling much better being a shorter length – a lot less tangles, and all it needs is a very quick brush in the morning to get ready! I mean, that’s all I did before with long hair, but those knots sometimes took me twenty minutes to brush out when it was waist length!
Anyway, that’s quite enough rambling now! Have you all had a good Christmas break? Have you got any plans for New Year? We’re going to Charley’s holiday cottage again, this time for a Murder Mystery party with a small group of us, so I’m excited about that.
I’ll be back soon with more outfit posts (and others hopefully!) – I still have one set of photos from our work Christmas party back when I still had long hair!
