To Tommy from Zooey...by Jessica...Navy and Red Cable Knit Dress

Zooey Deschanel has been sporting dresses from her Tommy Hilfiger "To Tommy from Zooey" line lately on her show "New Girl," and I really like the dress below:

Honestly, the main part I like is the red belt, but apparently it's not even part of the original dress as you can see from the picture below.

I still like the dress, but I don't have much of a torso and this shape of dress really does nothing for me. It was time for me to make a similar dress but to my specifications.

I did my "cut around it" method. For the bodice, I copied a V-neck sweater that I really like. 

For the sleeves, I copied a dress I made a few months ago, but never posted on my blog. I don't actually post everything I make! Hard to believe, I know. . .

These are all the pieces I would use and then sew together.

I sewed the shoulders together first.

Then sewed the sleeves on.

Then, sewed down the side seams of just the bodice.

Added the ribbing to the sleeve cuffs.

Added ribbing to the collar. (This was tricky to get it to V nicely.)

Then, sewed the waistband onto the bodice. If you notice, I reinforced the waistband with pink ribbing on the inside of the red.

For the skirt, I cut one long piece and sewed the two sides together.

Normally, you would baste the entire skirt portion, but instead, I skipped that step and just stretched and sewed the elastic directly onto the top of the skirt. Also, I learned a trick from the fashion design course I'm taking: To make sure your elastic stays under the needle, pull it up through the foot at the beginning. Great trick!

The skirt.

Then I sewed the bodice waistband to the skirt. Actually, I sewed over the elastic band again doing this. This assures the waistband will stay put and reinforces that area.

Then, I hemmed my skirt. I don't know if you can tell, but when I fold the hem under to the wrong side, I pin on the opposite side--the right side. I do this, because I much prefer being able to see where I'm stitching the hem vs. guessing and hoping that it looks okay on the reverse side when I'm done. It's a little tricky the first time or so when you attempt this, but I believe it is well-worth the effort.

I just used a basic straight stitch to hem. I know the fabric is stretchy, but this part of the hem isn't going to stretch since the fabric for the skirt is gathered so much. Also, a straight stitch is lower profile than a stretchy zigzag. Hopefully, from this picture you can see how I'm stitching the hem from the right side. This keeps you from being at the mercy of your feed dogs that like to jam and pucker occasionally.

The finished dress. I didn't like that extra white stripe on the original dress, so that's why I just used red.

I like the cable knit of this fabric. Gives it a classy retro look.

The End!

Two Skater Dresses

It has come to my attention that a former student of mine enjoys reading these posts, so. . .a shout out to you, Lindsey! I miss you! A little bird told me your freshman year went well. . .(That little bird is your mother. I literally almost ran into her at Walmart. Literally.)

Speaking of Walmart, I found this neon yellow sporty jersey fabric at Walmart for $1.50 a yard and so I bought four yards. 

I had no idea what to do with it, so I thought I would start with a skater dress. I did my "lay another dress on top and cut around it" pattern system that I've been using lately.       It's really easy, Guys. Way easier than paper patterns that you have to pin. You should try it.

Maybe this picture will show you how easy it is. You just have to make sure you cut a seam allowance around whatever you cut. You can see here that I extended the torso down a few inches from the original dress. That's because I don't like when waists are just a tiny bit too high.

The piece I cut up there was the back piece with a higher collar. Here is how I cut the front. I used the cut piece as my pattern.

Then, I just cut around it.

But I stopped at the collar.

Then I replaced the original dress on top the piece I was cutting just now.

I tucked the back collar part in. . .

and cut around the front collar. 

To cut the skirt part, I just folded the bodice half of the dress in and laid the skirt part on top of my yellow fabric like this.

Then, I cut around it. You can play with these measurements, you know. For instance, I made the skirt 1/2 an inch longer.

When it came to sewing, I had to choose which side of the fabric I wanted to be the good side. This is athletic fabric, so usually this is the side that shows:

But that was a little too much texture for me and found that the back side was actually more solid.

Skipping ahead. I sewed the dress together but when it came to hemming, I hemmed the front middle bottom hem up 1/2" more than the hem I did the rest of the way around. This allowed for "butt lift." If you don't know what I'm talking about, skip it. I just hate when dress hems hang just a tiny bit higher in the back. Drives me nuts.

Here is a closer picture to show what I'm talking about. I trimmed that edge after taking this picture, just so you know.

The end! All in all this dress only took 1-2 hours. I wasn't really paying attention.

Okay, I know this hem is kinda tacky. Usually, you are supposed to double fold before you hem, do a lining, or use bias tape, but I didn't do any of that for two reasons: (1) If I double folded the collar and sleeves which are curved, then they would have bunched up funny. (2) The only reason to double fold, lining, or bias tape is because you are afraid of the fabric fraying. Since this fabric doesn't fray, I didn't worry about it. You can't tell from the outside and that's the only side that matters. Back in the day when women only had like five dresses, it mattered. Nowadays when most women have tens if not hundreds of dresses, there is no reason to make them last through an apocalypse.

Okay, that dress went so fast that I decided to make another dress with fabric I already had. Before I sewed the yellow dress together, I traced the pieces onto paper. Then I drew a raglan line from the collar bone to the arm pit and cut the pattern along that line. That's what I used to make this raglan skater dress:

I saw a dress on eBay where the raglan line didn't end directly at the armpit, but rather ended just below it. I thought that was unusual, so I did the same thing.

I made a waist band on this one.

I was going to use just the pink chiffon for the shoulders, but it was a tad flimsy, so I backed it with the navy jersey as you can see here:

Also, to reinforce the waistband, I grabbed a strip of scrap jersey out of my scrap box. This is why you should save scraps.

The End!