2016 Summer Frock Parade – Vintage Bedsheet Dress

This is a second dress inspired by this vintage early 60s (?) one with the button tab shoulders:

You can see the first one I made here.

As you may have guessed from this post’s title the fabric is a (vintage?) bedsheet I found at Value Village probably 2-3 years ago.

I used the same bodice pattern as before, modified from this early 60s one:

The skirt is selvedge to selvedge panels of the bedsheet (yet another nice thing about using bedsheets for sewing is that they usually have pretty nice selvedges!). Since I wanted as little left over of the sheet as possible (and I think it was a twin size?) I cut 3 panels for the skirt, each 1.65m wide making nearly 5m in this skirt – it’s a lot of skirt! And sometimes makes finding the pockets difficult, lol. To make my life easier, I used my ruffler foot to pleat/gather it all up at the waist.

As opposed to a couple of the last dresses I posted that had flat piping at edges, this one has actual proper piping around the neckline/armholes and waist.

I only ever wore this dress with the white pumps and purse for these photos but I’ll have to make sure I have occasion to do so next year, they’re the perfect accessories for it!

A detail of the waist piping…

And the button tabs. I played around with a few button options (at first I was sure these orange ones in somewhat abstract flower shapes would be perfect) and ultimately decided on these blue ones that match the piping. At first I ruled them out as being too small but discovered I liked the effect of them in pairs.

Another exposed zipper using a vintage blue one because it’s what I had!

The dress interior (are you getting tired of these yet? I feel like they all look basically the same):

So much skirt!

for added stability I stitched-in-the-ditch around the piping of the frontwards facing tab on the right side – you’re seeing it from the underside here.

Such a happy dress!

And this is the last dress (so far) photographed by Taylor. Next post will be about what I did for her in exchange for playing photographer for me. Hint – we’re going back to historical sewing.