A Cosmic Bakerloo Dress
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote a blogpost. The holiday season came through like a whirlwind and that means my personal time and space went out the window. Ok, ok let’s be real, it was spent eating too much food and knitting. ‘Tis the season when the winter arrives. To add another level of complexity, I also threw out my back a couple of weeks ago. So there’s been no sewing due to the pain that immediately begins to radiate out of my lower back when I sit to sew! But luckily, I was super efficient and made this dress when I first received the fabric so I have one cute make to show you.
This fabric is from Little Johnny. It’s a “new to me” brand and I jumped at the chance to make something magical in this galactic print. There was one main inspiration that came to mind when I saw this fabric. The ever popular Niram Dress from Manimekala. This fabric is much darker in palate, but it immediately screamed “make me into a dress” when I laid my eyes on it. I didn’t really know what to expect with this fabric, as I had never used it before, but I was really happy with it when it arrived. The colours are gorgeously vibrant and the fabric is soft. The perfect combination for a fabulous dress. It’s a medium weight cotton in a good width, so that meant it only took 3 metres to make a dress instead of my usual 4. The colour was my main concern as I’ve been burnt before with prints not looking as vibrant in real life as they do online, but not this one! It was maybe even more vibrant that it looked online, and that was a-ok with me!
Now it was time to figure out what I was actually going to make. I was thinking of copying the exact silhouette of the Niram dress but the fabric used for that dress was much lighter and gave the dress a certain light feel even though it was a full length dress with long sleeves. This Little Johnny fabric was just more heavy with the darker colours so I wanted to ensure the silhouette didn’t push it into the “too much” category. I looked through my patterns and landed on the Bakerloo Dress from Nina Lee London. I had made this pattern once before and had extensive notes on my instructions but it had been so long I had totally forgotten what all the notes meant. Mental note for next time, make better notes. Haha.
Wasting no time at all, I cut out my bakerloo dress pattern and got to work. The cutting was uneventful and I went straight onto sewing. As I started sewing it was all coming together perfectly, so what was I going on about in my notes? Well that came later. The two things that my past self was trying to tell my future self was to be aware of the amount of fabric in the long sleeves and how the collar didn’t quite match up with the notches on the pattern. It all suddenly flooded back. I had helped test this pattern for the expanded size range and had never reprinted the pattern once the testing was completed. What a total goof. Lucky for me, I had opted for the shorter sleeve option in this make, so the excess fabric in the sleeve was no longer an issue, and for the collar I just eyeballed it rather than paying attention to the notches. Now that those hurdles were overcome it was a pretty straight forward sew.
Overall I am in love with my make. It totally exceeded expectations. Half way through I was a little unsure with the pattern and fabric pairing, but once I had finished my husband and bestie Emily were super encouraging. They’re the two fashionistas in my life so if they give their tick of approval then I know I’ve nailed it. Here’s hoping I can make some more cute dresses soon, but for now I’ve got to enjoy the ones I’ve done and I’m going to continue knitting cardigans to match with them!
