Christmas Outfit No. 4 - My Ultimate Christmas Dress!

Its the last Christmast post!!!

This dress revolves around the most amazing Christmas fabric I have found, and the best thing about it was that there was a full 7 metres of it!

Now I really really wanted to do justice to this magnificent fabric, so I grabbed out my pattern for the sweetheart neckline bodice from my tropical print dress and made some decorative enhancements:

Here is one of them - that bloody bow took one whole hour to make.  Mind you this could be because this was the third dress I was sewing in two days and I was a leeeeetle tired by then!

I then cut out 2.5m from the length of the fabric to make a really full gathered skirt - I wanted it to be as full and as gathered as possible!

What I ended up with was this:

HOW ADORABLE!!!

This is my favourite one of the week, so I made sure to save it to Friday.  I love the way that the bow and the faux wrap bust and halter tie make it look like I'm wrapped up like a present.

I actually got the inspiration for the bow from the print on the fabric - it has bows wrapped around sticks of holly.

And once again, this bodice has six bones - two in the front, two in the back and two in the sides.

Oh, and I also went way out with my accessories for this outfit - if you're going to go over the top, you need to go OVER THE TOP!

The necklace is my last piece this year from Lucy Luxxe, and I call it my Christmas Crazy necklace.  Renee made it for me by casting from some vintage brooches I purchased - see the Santa on the hair bow?  I also have the Rudolf one, but there was no where for it on this outfit...

So that is my final Christmas outfit!  I hope you've all enjoyed the festive madness!!

Merry Christmas to you all!!!!!

Beccie
xxx

Christmas Outfit No. 3 - The Jolly Santa Circle Skirt

If you haven't already worked it out I just LOVE Santa Clause!  So when I found this fabric, I bought it without a second though - even though there was only 70 inches or 1.5 metres of it, which isn't really enough to do anything...

But then I thought about it for a bit and worked out what I could do!

I grabbed out this pattern:

Its for a 10 gore circle skirt, which obviously I don't have enough fabric for, so I also grabbed out some red fabric and some ric rac...

Anyone know where I'm going here?

I traced the pattern piece and made some adjustments and then created this:

This is one of the 10 gores.  I ran ric rac down either side of the santa panel, like this:

I could have skipped that step, but I like details.

I had hoped to get each gore with a Santa on it... but I only had enough fabric for 6 gores, but I had 10... so I decided just to do 5 with Santa's and 5 without.  Thats the thing with vintage fabric, I can't just go down the street and get more!

I also ran a strip of the vintage fabric around the centre of the waistband, for no other reason than because I could.

The finished skirt looks like this!

I have paired it with an off the shoulder 'Bettie Page' brand top I have, and some lovely red shoes.  And this skirt is so huge that I wear TWO petticoats underneath it!

I am going shopping tonight to do all my Christmas shopping, and I'm going to have my photo taken with Santa while I'm there - and I thought this outfit would be PERFECT!!!  Check my Facebook page for updates on that bit of festive silliness!

And here is another picture of Stella, this time wearing her Christmas tshirt.  Its from a couple of weeks ago, before she had her hair cut:

The skirt is not as adorable as yesterday's outfit, but still over-the-top festive.  Don't you agree?

Beccie
xxx

Christmas Outfit No. 2 - Santa Wiggle Dress

Not that long ago I found this gorgeous piece of vintage Christmas fabric:

The lady on Etsy had two pieces of it to sell.  One was 64 inches long, the other was 54 inches long, so a total of 118 inches, or just under 3 metres.  By the looks of it they were originally Christmas themed curtains back in the 1950s, and due to this there was a little bit of staining and discolouration in places.  But for US$22 how could I pass it up?

I decided to make a cute wiggle dress from this adorable fabric.  But of course, I didn't just use one pattern... Can't go doing something like making it easy for myself can I!  I used the skirt pieces from this pattern (which actually fits me!):

And I turned this top into a bodice (this one fits me too!):

Actually, I really love this pattern, and it worked up really easily, so I might be using this a bit more to make myself some easy summer tops.  And I'm a bit partial to the lady on the left with the big bow belt and circle skirt... hmmmmm.

And what I ended up with was this:

Possibly the cutest wiggle dress ever!

To do justice to this piece of fabric, I decided that I needed to piece the bodice so that Santa was in the front and the reindeer wrapped around the side, with the border of the fabric around the bottom of the skirt and repeated again in the foldover at the top of the bodice.

I really like the way that the border repeats itself at the top and the bottom of the dress.

The back is really nice too, and has a vent instead of a split.  I read on someone else's blog about them having a phobia of skirt splits cause they can split without you noticing and before you know it your bottom is on display!!!!  I've been paranoid ever since!!!!

This bodice is also fully boned with 6 bones (two front, two back and two side).  Its not going anywhere!

And I decided to accessorise this one with vintage bracelets and a red belt.  I feel the dress is decorative enough without adding too many accessories.  Well today I feel like that... who knows next time I wear it!

Stella wouldn't stop photo bombing so I took that to mean she wanted to make an appearance too!

So what do we think of Dress Two???

Beccie
xxx