Zebra skater dress and shirt

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.3 m zebra patterned knit and black cotton knit

Haberdasheries: none!

How many Lady Skater dresses is too many? I don’t know, but I do know the answer isn’t four! So here’s my fifth one! (See my other four)

It is getting quite boring to use the same pattern, and cut the same pieces, again and again, but I like these dresses so much and they are so easy to combine, that I really want more of them! And on the plus side, at least I can just get started and don’t need to make a toile. This time, it was even more of the same, because the zebra fabric I found was very thin and needed another layer of fabric underneath it, so basically I had to cut two dresses to make one. But I’m happy with the result. I like bright coloured animal prints :).

The skirt is the original length, as in the pattern. Once again, I made elbow length sleeves, my favourite sleeve length for Skater dresses, and a low neckline at the back. And as the zebra fabric, which I got on Etsy, came in a fixed length which was enough to make a shirt as well, I did!

Leopard tartan floral skater dress and shirt

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.7 m viscose and polyester (?) knit

Haberdasheries: none!

I ran into this slightly crazy fabric at a store and wanted to buy the usual amount for a skater dress, but since there would have been a very small piece left over, I got that for free. Therefore, as I think this fabric will look nice with a jean skirt I plan on making, once I had cut out all the pieces for the dress, I also cut a shirt out of the leftovers.

 

I had just cut the front of the dress when I realised the part of the fabric I liked the least would be the main visible part when I wear a cardi over the shirt. So I cut the front again, with a nicer layout, and just used the first front as the back, resulting in a low neckline at the back of the shirt. I had been thinking of doing this anyway as I saw it on another skater and liked it.

This fabric was difficult to serge – I took a serging lesson and thought I now understood the machine, but it gave me a hard time again with this dress and skirt – and also nasty to hem, as it’s got velvety swirls on it which are thicker than the rest of the fabric. The twin needle hem initially looked like this:

Eek. This made me think about why I twin needle the hem of the skirt anyway. The sleeves, sure; they need to be elastic, after all. But the skirt doesn’t! So I ripped the hem and restitched it with a single needle, and that looks much better.

Blotchy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.5 m rayon and polyester Ponte di Roma knit

Haberdasheries: none!

I’m not quite done making Lady Skater dresses yet! The third one I’ve made is more suitable for autumn and winter, as it’s made from a thicker, Ponte di Roma knit. The fabric is supposed to be half rayon and half polyester, but the polyester seems to be on the inside, so I hope this dress won’t be too perspiration inducing…

I bought the fabric online. I really liked the photo of it, and even the sample I ordered first, but when the full piece of cloth arrived it turned out the pattern, which in my mind was supposed to look pretty random, was really repetive:

I wasn’t happy about this, but I made the dress anyway since it’s so little work, and I think the repetitiveness isn’t that obvious when I wear the dress.

I had big problems getting my serger to cooperate when I made my previous two skater dresses, but this time it behaved admirably once again. I think it’s just got a problem with very thin fabric, for some reason.

Here’s the dress in progress. I decided not to topstitch the neckline this time.

Again, I lengthened the sleeves and the skirt by a few centimetres, while shortening the bodice quite a bit.

 

Lacy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 3 m rayon or cotton/rayon knit

Haberdasheries: none!

So, when I didn’t have any trouble using my overlocker for my KittySkater shirt, I thought: this is going so well, let’s carry on with the next Lady Skater dress straight away! And as soon as I put this fabric under the machine, it started skipping stitches like mad, and driving me crazy as before. WHY?!

I wanted to take this dress on holiday with me so I was determined to finish it quickly, but don’t ask what it looked like on the inside… Or well, I’ll show you:

The only reason I got away with this and could actually wear the dress, is that the lace design hides the gaps in the seams. I have now fixed those by zigzagging the missing bits on my regular sewing machine.

I’ve got a lace print shirt I really like, so I was looking for a lace print fabric for a Lady Skater dress and found this:

I was happy to find something so close to what I was looking for (that doesn’t often happen!) but I didn’t like the border, as I think it looks too different from the rest of the print. So I bought three metres and hoped that would be enough to avoid using the border. When I came home I realised that unless I wanted a black lace band running down my front and back, I’d actually have to cut the fabric perpendicular to its grain! I had no idea whether that would be acceptable (the dress might start stretching too much lengthwise after repeated wearing), but as it had similar amounts of stretch in both directions, and I didn’t like the vertical print option, I just went for it.

Pattern matching this was a bit of a nightmare as all the lace patterns had different widths and their centres didn’t line up, but I think I did a nice job!

Happy Halloween! – A Kitty skater shirt

Pattern: Drafted based on Kitchy Coo’s Lady Skater pattern

Fabric: 1.5 m organic cotton knit

Haberdasheries: none!

First: my serger not giving me ANY trouble! :P

I don’t think I’ll be making a habit of making basic shirts (it is handier, and even cheaper, to buy them) but I really liked this fabric, yet didn’t want an entire dress out of it. So I used the Lady Skater sleeves as they were, and the bodice with quite a bit added to the bottom.

In my enthusiasm about my serger cooperating, I forgot I was supposed to hem the sleeves and bottom before serging the side seam. So it was a bit of a tricky job to hem the sleeves, but I do think I prefer this method, because at least the seam lines up everywhere! I find it almost impossible to line up the seams when serging, even if I baste them first.

Happy Halloween everyone!

A Lady Skater fan

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2,38 m printed cotton knit by Megan Blue Fabrics (strange amount; I don’t know how much I intended to buy, but this was exactly enough!)

Haberdasheries: About 1,5 m narrow elastic

Firsts: sewing with knit fabric, using an overlocker for garment construction, using a twin needle

So many people have made this dress, and rightly so. It feels like a night gown when you wear it, but it looks so elegant! An excellent combination.

I think it’s great that there’s a printing overview in the pattern! I missed that on previous print-at-home patterns, and that caused me to print some unneeded pages, which were actually empty for my size, or which had parts on them that I wasn’t using. Rather a waste of paper.

To be honest, when I first started working on this dress I wasn’t too happy with the pattern, because it seemed like I had to do so much alteration that I felt I might as well have improvised. But then I found the problem was just that the sizing table somehow didn’t work for me. According to my measurements, which I double checked, my upper bust is a size 4 and my waist a size 3. So I graded between the sizes and made a tryout bodice out of some knit fabric I had in my stash, but even before trying it on I could tell it was too wide. It didn’t have any negative ease at all! I had to take it in by exactly such an amount that I realised I should just use the size 3 pattern.

The tryout bodice also showed I needed to make some alterations. It hung too low at the front and back, so I made the bodice MUCH shorter. It’s strange that this was necessary, as the pattern is intended for women who are quite a bit shorter than me, but I cut 5,5 cm off the bottom of the front bodice pattern and also made it straight rather than curved.

I made the long sleeved version, and lengthened the sleeve pattern by 5 cm. Finally, I added 8 cm to the skirt pattern to make sure it was long enough, and after trying the dress on, decided not to cut any of that length off again. I folded the hem back 16 mm and hemmed it with a twin needle. This was a first, and I liked it. It was very easy to do and gave the hems a store bought look, which I think is a good thing. (Since I’ve started making contemporary clothes, I have been looking at store bought clothes in more detail and noticed they are often very inaccurately sewn. Obviously I don’t want that to be the case with whatever I make, but I do prefer if my clothes don’t look homemade.)

This is the first time I used an overlocker for garment construction. I used it before to finish the seams on the inside of my pyjama trousers and jeans 1 and 2, but I sewed those together on my regular machine. But because of the elastic seams, an overlocker is just perfect for constructing knit garments. However, I rather struggle with mine. I watched the first lessons of the Craftsy Beginner Serging course, which I can really recommend. After watching I felt like I understood the machine a lot better than I did from just reading the manual. The course also comes with a ‘serger stitch book’ including troubleshooting list and sample pages. Amy, the teacher, suggests making samples using four different coloured yarns which match the four colours of the threading manual, and I found that extremely helpful, because when something goes wrong it enables you to see which thread is causing the problem. And writing the tensions and other settings on the sample pages means you don’t have to remember them or discover them all over again with each project.

Despite the excellent course, I still had overlocker problems, though. The main one being that the machine will work perfectly the one moment, and create stitches like these the next:

Without anything having changed! I hope I’ll understand why at some point, because the randomness of this drives me up the wall. 

I didn’t use clear elastic, as I read on some blog that regular elastic also worked fine, and clear elastic seems like the kind of material that contains harmful chemicals. I didn’t put any elastic in the shoulder seams, as none of my store bought jersey shirts have that, and the shoulders never sag – why would they?

I think I pattern matched the neckline band quite nicely, but I forgot to try to pattern match the skirt seams! One of them ended up almost perfectly matched, after all, but the other did not :P. The bodice and skirt also don’t match because I cut the aforementioned length off the bodice, but I think I’ll probably only wear the dress with my bow belt or a cardi over it, so that doesn’t really bother me.

This is my first Lady Skater dress – and I’m sure many more will follow! I’m currently shopping for more knit fabrics, which is something entirely new to me! As they are unusable for historical projects, I always used to look right past them!