Electric Sequined Laurel

A few weeks ago we met with our fabric rep, Diana,  and ordered some fantastic new fabric. I mentioned that Nan and I fell in love with this brown corded sequins net, mostly because the swatch was layered over a brilliant blue and the combination was so stunning. Check it out:

I layered the sequins over our electric blue douppioni. What a brilliant combination! I tried layering this over a ton of other solids, but this one just couldn’t be beat.

I made this up in the Colette Laurel, which I think is the perfect silhouette for this material.

It’s a simple shape, and easy to sew. Especially with a thick and textured fabric such as this, few darts and few style lines are mucho appreciated. I don’t know what possessed me to finish this dress with French seams… it would have been so much easier and smarter to just finish them with bias tape. I did finish the openings with self-bias tape.

Cutting out the dress took some head-scratching, but here’s my process (naturally I forgot to photograph it, so use your imagination please). I did not want to insert a zipper, because this dress is pretty loosely-fitted and I didn’t think it necessary. So I folded back the zipper seam allowance and cut both the front and back pattern pieces on the fold of the silk. And then I opened up the silk, laid it on top of the net, and cut the net. Oh, and I removed the hem allowance for each, so I could use the selvedge edge of the silk  and the scalloped edge of the net as the hems.

The silk is technically an underlining, but to make sewing the darts easier, I sewed them individually on each layer before I basted the layers together to sew up. You can see that in the back shot:

So funky, I love it!

~Debbie