It's Oonapalooza and Everyone's Invited!

Oona's blog was one of the first sewing blogs I started reading. I was (and still am) baffled by how intuitively she seems to turn fabric into amazing garments and the brilliant ways she uses prints. So when I heard about Oonapalooza I took the loudest, most technicolor print out of my stash and got celebrating!

This is a rayon challis I bought from Wanderlust fabrics, and it's truly great in person! Kelli from True Bias used it to make some shorts, and I decided to go all out and make a dress.

This dress fills a very real gap in my wardrobe. The days of working mostly from home are over, meaning my usual strategy to cope with heat (stay inside and don't wear clothes) are not really an option anymore. I took a look at my clothes and noticed there's a severe lack of light and airy dresses fit for hot days and mobility. Time to do something about this!

The pattern for this is mostly self-drafted (Oona style!) I started from my trusted bodice block, spread it to add volume (but not as much as for this dress) and simply lengthened it into a dress. This was then chopped up again to create the contrast yoke.

"I can see your bra straps" "phbbbbt"

The yoke was the hardest part about sewing this incredibly easy dress. It's a stretch lace I bought from Mondepot with my Sew it Up prize (yay!) and the trickiest part was getting a sharp point and sewing the stretchy bits to the woven bits without everything going wobbly. I stabilized the bias cut edges on the challis with fusible tape and just used lots of pins and a walking foot! The neckline and armholes are finished with narrow black bias tape.

To lift the entire thing out of muumuu territory I just cut a long strip out of my leftover fabric and used it to make a tie belt. I like how the volume worked out: it's super floaty and light but still wide enough to provide loads of airflow.

I think that might be the closest I'll ever get to a cool Oona pose on a tiny bridge.

This dress was a dream to sew (it took me two short evenings to draft the pattern, cut everything and sew it together). I loved wearing it and felt really comfortable, even on a sticky hot train (which was shared with some peeps returning home from a Belle Epoque picknick at the Antwerp Zoo... They were quite literally dripping but looked SO AWESOME). I love it when the result of a challenge like this ends up being very much my thing!

And for those who want to frolic in this Garden of Eden I'm standing in: you're out of luck! It belongs to Luc Cromheecke and his wife Sabine, an awesome comic book artist who fed me tea, cookies and wisdom during a three-month internship two years ago. He bought one of my boyfriend's drawings and we decided to deliver it in person, which led to this feast:

It's a good thing we took photos beforehand because I ended up absolutely stuffed and barely able to move!