All That Glitters

I hate linen. I hate how it wrinkles of course, but I also don’t really like how it feels against the skin and how the weave often sort of reminds me of burlap. But when I spotted this shiny piece of ⭐️GOLD⭐️ linen at Tissus Passion, like the magpie that I am, I forgot any bad feeling I had ever had about linen and brought this beauty home.

I immediately knew I’d make it into a pair of Deer&Doe Goji shorts, even though I’d had other fabrics in mind for those. And I made them right before leaving for Spain last year, when I realised how in dire need I was of shorts. Making them was pretty uneventful: I followed the pattern to the letter and I don’t remember encountering even the tiniest problem.

I cut a size 36 waistband, then traced the legs from a size 36 waist to size 40 hips. My hip measurements put me in the size 42 column, but I thought I could get away with cutting a hip size smaller with such a loose style. And I was right! Oh, and I was afraid it would be difficult to get in and out of the shorts with such a big difference between my waist and hips, but I was wrong!

These shorts have been worn often enough last summer and this summer, but they could have been worn a lot more. Their only problem is… their fabric! It wrinkles SO. MUCH. I know I’m supposed to embrace the wrinkles, that they’re part of the beauty of linen, blah blah blah… I just can’t stand it! I feel like it makes me look so sloppy! This didn’t stop me from wearing these otherwise very cute (I love how they look like a very short skirt from certain angles!) and particularly comfortable shorts on very casual occasions (e.g. knitting afternoons on a stone bench), but I know I would have worn them way more often had I made them out of a cute cotton or viscose. At least now I know for sure. I. hate. linen.

Apples and Pears

So apparently I’ve decided to break my own record for longest time between taking pictures of a garment and blogging said garment. I took these on May 26^th, close to three months ago! These three months flew by between a very busy end of school year and a whole month of July in Spain. And when I remembered these pictures after coming back from my holiday, I found them so bad that I didn’t feel like publishing them. Then I realised that they were actually no worse than my usual pictures, so here we are! I even threw in a few holiday pictures at the end for good measure!

I sewed this dress last summer, right before leaving for Spain that year. The pattern is the Lucie dress from République du Chiffon. It’s a very simple pattern; I think I made it in one day, two days tops. The most time-consuming part (still not very time-consuming) was finishing the neckline and armholes with self-made bias tape, from the same fabric as the dress.

While we’re on the subject of fabric, I bought this one from Les Tissus du Chien Vert yeaaars ago. It’s a lovely apple and pear print viscose (as always, you can click the pictures to enlarge them and see the details), which at first glance looks like the same kind of fabric as this one, but is way better quality. My only quibble with it is that it is quite see-through. This, coupled to the quite low back, makes it a holiday only dress: I’d never dare to wear it at work even on the hottest of days!

I made a couple small modifications to the pattern in that I added side-seam pockets and lengthened the skirt pieces (but not the bodice pieces) by 3 cm. I then added some more skirt length by sewing a 0,5 x 1 cm hem instead of the 3 x 3 cm hem of the pattern.

This is by far one of my most comfortable summer dresses. It really feels like I’m not wearing anything (in a good way, not in a “I feel naked” way). It’s so comfortable in fact that I wore it so much in Spain last summer that I didn’t even want to take it with me this year for fear of not giving my other dresses a chance to get worn! Look, it’s the perfect dress:

to eat arroz con leche,

to eat your bodyweight in churros,

And to pretend you’re freakishly strong! I mean, what more could you ask for?

In all seriousness, though, I’m wearing this dress on half our vacation pictures from last year. So this year it stayed in Belgium, and I was very happy to find it when I returned during this August heatwave!