Sew Clueless

Carrying on the red theme...  I unashamedly have pink as my favourite colour (in case you couldn't tell by the theme of the blog). The girlier and more pastel the better. Red comes a close second however, as it's vibrant fierce original cousin.  Cue - an all out red dress. This is McCall's 7313 - a knit dress pattern with two neckline choices (scoop vs high), two skirt lengths and several sleeve lengths. It's a "Learn to Sew" pattern so I did find there were slightly more instructions and tips than a typical Big Four pattern, which was nice.  I cut a size 8 based on finished measurements due to the known generous ease of the big 4 patterns. (Body measurements actually places me at size 10 with a  size12 waist.). I made no modifications to this and ended up still with a reasonable fit. The dress seems to run quite short - it's pretty standard for me to shorten both torso and hem in most patterns however with cutting the short version of the skirt I didn...

 I love a good pencil skirt.  This is an eye-searingly red pencil skirt I had made to prove this.  This is from Simplicity 2154 -  a lovely vintage reproduction pattern with a straight forward pencil skirt. (I had initially bought it to make the adorable bow blouse, but six years later that's still not eventuated. #queenofprocrastination)  The skirt has double darts front and back for ease of fitting which I liked. Vent at the back, side zipper.  I cut a size 8 (which was a size down - based on the provided measurements I should have been a size 10) after eyeballing the finished hip size measurements. It fitted a smidge tight around the waist but otherwise was fine. The waistband was designed to overlap but I felt like that added extra thickness to the waist so I shortened it so the two ends met up flush and joined them with multiple hook and eyes I doubled the waistband width as I like having a high waisted look (it gives me the false security of tummy sup...