Summer Sewing: Cotton Dresses to Wear at Home

A Thread of Love

by Eduard Niczky (German 1850-1919)

(Please note: You can move your cursor or finger over the scripture citations for a pop-up window of the complete verse.)

Last summer I posted a picture of this soft cotton print from the Wal-Mart fabric department.( By the way, Wal-Mart is re-establishing the fabric department in some stores country-wide.)  Since then, several ladies have written to tell me that they had purchased some of it, and included photographs of the finished garments.

  I also shared how to make a planning page with a drawing and notes about the garment you are going to make. Ladies have also been sending me these, to show. The one you see below was sent by a lady who also uses New Look pattern 6352 , adding a flutter sleeve and a ruffle at the hem. This is great for summer because it is loose and cool. This dress has no buttons or zipper but you could add a side or back zipper.

Another friend sent me this picture of a skirt and blouse made from the same fabric,

and this is what I have done with the same print: very similar to my e-friend's sketch at the beginning of the post, only I chose long sleeves. The dress is not that long; the dress form has very short legs! This pattern is very easy, but for some people may be too big, so trying making it a size smaller. Also, the neckline will need to be raised, and the shoulders will have to have additional inches added at the neckline.

The neckline fits better than it looks on the dressform.

The reason I use this pattern is that it is easy for the homemaker that has so much to do, and she can get it finished in a day.  After I cut out a dress, I take the fabric pieces I just cut out, and lay them on another piece of folded fabric and cut out another dress. Using the pre-cut dress as a pattern is much easier, as it needs no pins or weights to hold it down, so I always have a dress cut out that will be used for a pattern. This I do with other patterns and styles, also, if I like the way the dress turned out.

I will address a question that comes to my email sometimes about my sewing: What do you do with all the clothes and crafts you make?

If you sew with cotton, you know how wonderful it is to wear, and you tend to wear the clothes to death. Every last wear is squeezed out of these garments until it cannot be worn again, and then it is cut down into an apron. If you use the line to dry the garment, you might take something that seems like it has absolutely no wear left in it, hang it to dry, and then discover that the sun and wind added some more starch and body to the cloth, and you can get a few more wearings from it.

Homemaking being as active as it is, the cotton dresses will receive a lot of wear and tear, so I do not expect them to last for years. However, some of the ones that I made for out-of-the-house have lasted 15 to 20 years.

Since these dresses are not expensive and are made of cotton fabrics, they do not hang in the closet for years or go unworn, and therefore, are used up faster than other types of clothing. If it looks like my blog is full of dresses and you wonder how in the world I could wear them all, remember I dress this way at home daily, and I do not wear the same dress every day. I have at least 7 dresses so I can rotate them.  My newer dress just off the sewing machine will be worn to church (about 4 of them) and then as the older dresses wear out, I will use the newer ones to wear to Ladies Bible Class, Wednesday evening Bible study, or Sunday night church.  Eventually I will have several dresses to wear during the week, with newer ones to wear to other occasions outside of the home.  

The pillows, blankets, and other crafts get used up also. My family lives in our house and everything gets some pretty hard wear-and-tear, and I am not afraid to use the pretty ruffled pillows, because if they wear out, it is always exciting to make something else.     Smaller items get put in a basket by the front door to give away to guests or to take to someone I visit, or to be used as a gift when it is needed.

Hand sewn cotton blouses and skirts feel MUCH different than factory clothing. For one thing, they are breathable and do not cling as much, making them much more comfortable. Yes, you can get 100% cotton knit tops and you can get cotton skirts in stores, but it is treated with some different product, which will make it feel much different, even after it is washed, than the hand made cotton clothing.

Making your own clothes, or having a dressmaker, gives you a better fit and more control over the styles, the length or the color choice.  

My favorite fabrics are by David Textiles from Texas, which are stocked by Walmart. The Hawaiian dress in one of the previous posts is a David fabric.  

To plan your sewing, try making a list of things you do and places you go, and then sketching the type of clothing you need to wear. Such a list might look something like this:

Worship Service -  solid color dress and short jacket --make about 4 of them, and use them later when they are wearing out, for your daily wear.

Daily Wear At Home - 7 calico prints of various colors, with sleeves, and one white short jacket to wear over them when you have to go away from home.

Ladies Bible Study - several versions of a skirt and casual blouse (4 or 5 of them to rotate in wear)

Midweek Bible study - a casual dress (make about 4 of these to rotate in wear)

Special Occasions - one black dress with jacket and one white skirt and top, or more formal.

Away from home: vacations, beach, sight seeing, touring, and anything else: it is fun to choose fabrics to go with the activity you are anticipating, or with the scenes or climate.  If you are a "mood" dresser like I am, think of the colors you will see wherever you go, and choose your fabric accordingly.

I am looking forward to taking some time to demonstrate on this blog how to make this dress, with easy instructions. 

One good reason to make cotton dresses for the home is that they are a woven, natural fabric, which wear thinner as they are washed and hung out, and they will not hang in the closet for years and years, like some of the clothing made from oil and plastic products.  Cottons do not cling to body odor as badly as other fabrics, and if they are sewn by someone, rather than store-bought, they have a more refreshing feeling next to the skin.

Some manufacturers have been able to duplicate this in cotton garments. It is a matter of finding them to purchase. A knit cotton will not be as nice as a woven cotton, and a rayon will not be as comfortable as a cotton, even though it is a derivative of cotton.

Natural Education

Hearing

by Jessie Wilcox-Smith

Lillibeth has a post about her own experience as a child growing up in a home-school. Click here to go and read it. She has opened comments just for that post, so I hope someone will leave a comment for her!

The Scales

by Jessie Wilcox Smith, 1907

The Boy In A Tree 1905

by Jessie Wilcox Smith

Child Reading on a Couch 1905

by Jessie Wilcox Smith

Wheat and Tea

Harvest

by Leon Augustin L'hermitte

France, 1844-1925

The painting, above, shows some interesting garments in colorful aqua and deep sea green. It is possible the painting depicts a family farm, with women from the same household, helping with the harvest. The fabric was sewn into several skirts, vests, and aprons. I usually buy more than I need of a print or color that I like, and then other women in the family get a skirt or dress or apron too. I like the color of the dye on the apron of the woman in the forefront of this picture: a deep aqua color, and of course, the hay color in that painting looks the same today as it did a hundred years ago.

In this picture you can see the field of ripened wheat in the background. I used the gold lame' woven material for the table cloth, because it is similar to the way the wheat glows in the sun. 

 I looked for wheat patterned tea sets but to no avail. Those of you who frequent thrift stores and garage sales like I do, might know what I am talking about.

 Those are the cups and saucers that have a wheat emblem on them, that are always there, and no one wants them. They aren't especially pretty and not very popular, so they are always the last things left in the tea cup area of the thrift stores. Well this year I actually tried to buy some, since they are often as low as 25 cents a cup, and there were none. For years and years I saw those wheat china sets and this year, nothing. I thought they would go well for the wheat tea-party.

The wheat is now being cut, so I quickly had a little guy take an annual photograph standing in the wheat, wearing the green piece of minky  which I showed in my previous post, as a shawl.

I did not get the "wheat" dress finished, and already I see the wheat is being chopped off, in the distance. I hope to get a picture of the new tractors on the block, and note some of the latest technology in them. It must be fun to be a farmer these days.

Not much happens around here, folks, so we make our own events. Today the wheat was taken, so 12 family and friends gathered at the edge of the field with cameras to record the event, as we do each year. 

It was hard to get a clear photo with all that dust, but here is what these wonderful machines look like. 

I picked a small bouquet of wheat before it was all taken.

Everyone filled their tea cups and loaded delicious sandwiches on the plates so they could sit outside and watch the various farm machines do the rest.

If you really want a wonderful bouquet, ask a child to pick it. The children usually have no notion of current trends in floral combinations and come up with rich bouquets, full of every color and shape. 

Here is a beautiful book published by John Deere, about tractors:

It shows what the driver sees out his front window,

and all the things inside the cab,

as well as all the conveniences,

and some history.

This new farm machinery is nothing like our Daddy's tractors. They

are so interesting, it makes me want one, even though I don't have anywhere to put it and no field to plow.

Update:  I found a few wheat patterned tea cups in the thrift store today: 99cent each.

How to Apply Piping to a Neckline

The Material Market

by Jules Trayer, France 1824-1908

Adding piping to the neckline of a cotton dress will make the garment last a lot longer. The seam of the neckline is less likely to fade or wear thin. I hope I can demonstrate adequately how to apply piping, but if you need more help, try searching some free sewing videos online, or find some "sewing piping" tutorials on sewing sites.

Although it is not necessary to have a facing, when sewing piping on a neckline of a dress or blouse, I find a facing helps keep the edges of the trim concealed and the stitching hidden, as well as making it lie flat. Before applying this trim, join the front and back shoulder seams of the garment, press them open, and then, with right side facing you, lay the piping trim down on the neckline, with the rounded edge toward the body of the dress, and the raw, unfinished edge of the piping toward the neck, as shown, above.

Put the top raw edge of the piping trim right on top of the raw edge of the dress neckline, on the outside of the fabric (not the inside).  Stitch along the same stitching that is already on the piping, all around the dress neckline.

Piping is hard to cut and join in a smooth way, so this is how I finish it: curve the end pieces downward off the fabric and stitch them. The white stitching is my own machine stitch, so you can see where I sewed. The other side of that stitching will be your guide for sewing the facing.

Prepare your facing by joining the shoulder seams, pressing the seams open. Iron a one-fourth inch hem on the facing and stitch it all the way around.  

The piping will be between the facing and the dress bodice. Put the dress part, with the under side showing, up, for the machine stitching. This is where you will see the previous stitching of the piping showing through.

Lay the facing on the inside of the dress and then, on the outside of the dress, stitch along the previous stitching line--the one that holds the piping.  That way, the facing and the piping are on the exact same stitching line.

With scissors, trim the excess fabric to about a fourth inch and then make a close zig-zag or some kind of edging stitch on the cut edge.  Turn the facing to the inside of the dress and press with a hot iron. Hand-stitch the facing to the inside of the dress, all along the lower edge of the facing piece.

Here is the finished dress. I had to piece it in several places, because there was so little of the fabric.That means that instead of putting a pattern piece on a whole length of fabric, I sewed small pieces together and then laid the pattern for the sleeves, and part of the hem. 

I have used this pattern and added sleeves that I liked better, from another pattern. This style is so easy, having only a front and back and facings and sleeves. I have done many different things with it, including adding a bias ruffle at the hem, different trims at the neckline, and a variety of sleeves. The neckline needs to be raised, but not a lot. If you want to make a dress in a day, this is the perfect pattern, or if you need to sew for someone else, this one has very little stress involved.

Here's a sewing tip you might like: If you have a pattern that you would like to use again, or one that has become a favorite, take the dress you just cut out, and lay that fabric on top of some new fabric, and cut around it. It is a lot easier to do that, than to get the tissue or paper pattern out and anchor it down and cut around it. The fabric "pattern" from the previous dress pieces clings more easily to the fabric, and does not move when you cut around it.

A couple of weeks ago I showed my experiment making a shirred blanket on the machine. Here is a much easier way to make an interesting, dimensional type blanket or spread. This is a fabric called Minky, which looks like the old fashioned ball fringe and chenille bedspreads. I quite like it, even though I prefer natural wovens, and it looks good as a bed spread. It does not need to be hemmed, but some matching ball fringe would look nice around the edges.

This is what it looks like on the bed. It is a very soft fabric and very pleasant to the touch. You can wash it and hang it out to dry and it will not get stiff or scratchy.

I am going to experiment again, and make a little jacket to match a dress, with the green color Minky.

See also, How to Make Your Own Piping from string and bias cut fabric

A Summer Ramble

A Summer Ramble

by Frank Herbert, American (b. 1920)

I was looking for paintings of wheat, when I found this beautiful piece of art. What a lovely way the figure compliments the surrounding scene. Nature is the guide for much of my choice of fabrics and sewing styles, and wheat is something that I've always wanted to "match" with fabrics. I am looking for a soft cotton printed with wheat kernels, on a cream-colored background, but so far have found nothing like it.

From my front window, this is the scene before me today:

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Though I have never thought of the wheat color as being particularly desireable as a color to wear, I've come to feel differently about it since great crops of it surrounds me. These photographs that I have taken do not show the vivid beauty of it in the sun. In the moonlight it shimmers like fine spun gold.

Here's some wheat print fabric on ebay

A wheat rubber stamp from the Kansas Heritage Center. Kansas is the "wheat state."

A Summer Evening

by  Leopold-Francois Kowalsky, 1856-1931 (Russian)

(The garments on the women appear to be peasant style

and I would love to know about the pattern or sewing technique. The 

dresses

look good with the flowers.)

From the north window is a field of blossoms from another crop, and I did have some fabric to make a dress to go with it.

The blue of that sky is amazing. Now I need to find some fabric to make a dress to go with it. 

The sleeves have a piece of white fabric in the middle because I did not have enough of the main fabric. I'll show you how to do that on a sewing tutorial on some future post.

The neckline is trimmed in white eyelet,

and there is a bias type ruffle on the hem: