I have had the idea in my head fr this dress for a while now. In fact since I saw this wonderful dress on Modcloth I have wanted to make my own.
I am not sure it is even on the site any more but I saved the picture and continually looked at it. I love the red piping, the tabs and the carousel print. I found a pattern pretty easily which I thought would work really well and snapped it up along with red piping and a big metal zipper as I thought about doing an exposed zipper right down the back.
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| New Look 6864 |
The black dress and the floral one on the far right are perfect for the circle neckline and waistband I want. Then I started to look for carousel print material. Here I hit a massive snag. I just could not find anything anywhere that was both carousel, or as my family call them, golden gallopers AND had the same red/yellow/beige tones as the original dress. I knew I wouldn't find an exact match but I did want to keep the original tones of the dress.
The nearest I could find was
this on Spoonflower but it was just too costly to pay for it, pay for postage and pay customs too. (I looked at A LOT of websites!) I started widening my search to circus themed and found some cute
Cath Kidston fabric but it was still expensive. I then set up an ebay search to alert me if anything with 'carousel fabric' came up and up popped just under a metre of this very cute boarder print.
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| My lovely border print and Kona Banana |
It was the right colour and had actual horses on it rather than just circus but it was a border rather than full fabric but I decided this could work and snapped it up for a couple of quid. Then the second search began fr a main fabric which would match the border and my bright red piping. I looked at a lot of beige and cream fabrics and considered some dobby gauze but I wasn't sure I would wear a cream dress that much as it is not a very practical colour. I then spotted some 'apricot' fabric on ebay which I thought matched the border but when it arrived I didn't like it. (This then got dyed purple and became my
Amazing 8 Hour Christmas Dress.)
After seeing the apricot I decided I would rather have a pale yellow main dress and browsed the Kona cottons which I had seen recommended on the blogosphere. I found
Kona Banana, fell in love and that was it! I rarely have to put so much time and effort into finding materials for a dress so this was all quite new to me.
Now on to the sewing!
