On Saturday I spent 13 hours sewing these dresses - more or less non-stop. Now, I question my decision-making when I get so immersed in something that I forget I have a body but I digress. I made these two dresses on Saturday - I didn’t use a pattern or even really have an exact image in mind, I just started with an idea and went from there. The basic premise of this making was to cut as little as possible into the fabric I have, and to see whether I could make something wearable out of my knowledge of sewing patchworks.

I began with the Patchwork Dress (I’ll call it). This dress was born of the scraps of the Wiksten Haori jacket that my friend Jordan helped make a couple of years ago- I washed, ironed and cut the pattern out and she assembled and sewed it for me (bless her heart).

The pattern’s called-for yardage was quite generous so I ended up with a lot of leftovers, some of it completely intact. Several months later, at the beginning of 2019, I patchworked the scraps, sewed them to the intact piece and put some batting inside, intending to make a baby quilt. Something about that never stuck, and I never ended up quilting it. So it sat for the last year and a half in a basket.

After a number of Instagram and Youtube holes, I found myself coming back to a ruched top/dress with ties - seen on Tessuti and The Essentials Club . Neither of these exactly matched what I wanted to do with this fabric, but I used their pictures and explanations (and some of the measurements, roughly) to determine how to approach making mine.

All the scrunchie sewing I’ve been doing lately prepared me for working with the elastic casing and also making the straps (made in the same way as the tube for a scrunchie is made. As I went along, the first elastic band I put in didn’t sit right, so I put in a second one and I like that more. I realized the side seam I’d sewn wanted to be not-quite the side, so I sewed the straps so that they made it so.

The patchwork dress can be worn as a skirt - I just pulled it down and used the tie straps to cinch it on my waist & I like the way that turning it into a garment seemed to bring the patchwork to life.

As I worked on the Patchwork Dress, I had a bit of an a-ha for what I might next make, and so the Gathered Dress was born. My goals with this were to practice gathering, and to cut into the fabric as little as possible. I bought it when I worked at a fabric store a few years ago - the last little bit left on the roll, 1.25 yards of Japanese-made cotton.

I took the piece (lengthwise) and sewed a gather, then held it up to my body and realized it wasn’t long enough with the gathering to fit around my body, so I took a dress I knew I wanted this one to be no shorted than, and cut off the bottom of the fabric length, cut that in half, and sewed it to the edge of the fabric (essentially patchworking my fabric piece to be longer for the gathering). Then I re-gathered and found the the circumference worked for my bust. I left the hem undone at this point because I used the bottom edge fabric to cut pieces for the straps and the “binding” I made for the top of the gathers. I then sewed together the two edges so that I had a tube with gathers at one end (the top).

I approached covering the gathers like I was binding a quilt - I cut a 2 in strip that I attached - if I did this again, I’d made it 3 inches at least, because it didn’t quite work out as a binding, the inside edge feels likely to unravel.

I made straps by folding and ironing a strip and sewing down one end, then I hemmed the bottom edge and finished off the inside of the “binding” by hand with an overcast stitch to stop it from fraying too much. Once I had it on my body, I realized that with a bit of cinching, it would work as a skirt (seeing a theme here?) so I made a couple of weird little straps and sewed them down just beneath the top binding.

Sewing garments has long intimidated me, and it felt like a truly joyful encounter with my sewing machine to make these two dresses. It got me thinking, maybe garments are not as complicated as I thought, and maybe I just need to keep approaching it with curiosity and willingness to do it ‘wrong’.