Japanese Dress Making, a,b: Part 1

I fell in love with this fabric and finally decided on a dress pattern I thought would compliment the beautiful design - something not too busy so that the focus is more on the print than the pattern. The pattern came from the Japanese dress book: Stylish Dress Book, most likely found on etsy.com

I really like the selvage edges of fabric and think it is a shame they are so often trimmed off and thrown out. I thought it would be fun to include it in my dress. It adds a token of who made the fabric and I thought it added an appropriate modern look to the neckline. I added a slightly raised boat neck to the dress as well, which is done with a really thick binding. I thought this also helped to bring in an element of elegance. This way the dress is swanky enough for a date, elegant enough for church and casual enough to go shopping in.

Japanese Dress Making a,b: Part 2

I added my favorite grosgrain to accent the skirt of the dress as well as on the sleeves.

The dress pattern came from dress a which is a simple a-line pattern. I added a drop waist by sewing swimsuit elastic to the inside, to help give the shape we westerners appreciate.

The sleeves were from dress, or top, b which are my favorite sleeves in the whole book. They are made of 2 parts: a top form-fitting piece attached to the lower piece which bubbles out a bit with a gathering. It is an elegant 3/4 sleeve length which can easily be lengthened if desired.

Japanese Dress Making: Part 2

Japanese Dress Making, i: Part 1

After being gone for so long I could not wait to clear the dust off of my sewing machine and get to work. My first project was this dress. It is sort of a Frankenstein of many parts of the Japanese dress making book: Stylish Dress Book. I was rather intimidated to begin this project as all instructions are in Japanese. But, I bought it from a seller on etsy.com who also provides a link to many translated sewing terms. Also, a quick Google search gave me a few more resources to buoy up my courage. The google results were actually more helpful than the ones from the seller because I could not match a single Japanese character from the instructions to her list!

I must say that out of all of the dresses I have made so far, this one is my most successful. Normally I end a dress project saying something like, "OK, so I can't lift my left arm up all the way, and I sewed the skirt on backwards, but it looks good so that's OK with me!. I did something!"

so that really made me happy. :)

I did dress i from the book which is pictured below on the model in black. I used sleeves from a different pattern, added a belt for some shape, and made some ruffles for style, and there you have it! The fabric is also Japanese which I bought here from Purl Soho.

I highly recommend this book if you want a lot of dress patterns. This is more of a beginner-intermediate level dress making book. The patterns also use a lot of the same pieces to make the different variations, so it is easy to exchange parts of a pattern with others in the book. One thing to remember is that these patterns do not come with seam allowances so you need to add those in when copying your pattern.A source of inspiration for me is Make Something a blog by a woman who runs a fabric shop out of Canada. There is a whole section of her blog dedicated to Japanese dress making.