A few years ago I scored a 4 metre bolt end of white pinwhale corduroy. I immediately knew I wanted to give it some shibori love though it took me until now to get around to it. Here it is divided up, pleated and tied. A tedious process, but the effort was worth it I think.
Put it through a dyebath along with a bunch of other things. In this case I used “indigo” coloured Procion fibre reactive dye from Kraftkolour.
I got three 1m pieces patterned like this meant for a skirt, some plain bits for a bodice and a smaller pleated bit for pockets. I undid the end most ties on the skirt pieces after the first long dip on the grounds that i didn’t want too much pale over my tum.
From there I built a fairly standard Montjoye dress. Semi fitted bodice and flared skirt. Except that I made a bunch of errors in the cutting. I’m still quite out of practice with sewing garments! Happily all errors were fixable in one way or another. The first big mistake was failing to allow the needed overlap for the intended buttoned front. Bother. Couldn’t fix that really without creating too much bulk. Never mind, I’ll just do a side zipper. Ah, but that means the skirt sections need to match the bodice waist properly both front and back. The skirt pieces were folded in half lengthways and divided diagonally to give a six panel skirt with the back panels joined in the centre. Guess who forgot to allow for the centre panel seam allowance in the back pieces? Yeh, me. That meant I had to dart the back of the bodice to get everything to fit. Happily that was actually a good thing. Then I found I needed to lift the whole skirt to place the pattern more pleasingly which meant the front skirt waist matchiness didn’t work anymore and the seams were all topstitched already so I wasn’t reseaming them. Botheration. I’m mostly laughing at myself here. I sure hope the next garment runs more smoothly!
The bodice has a fair few extra seams than would have been necessary if I hadn’t changed my mind about what garment to make from this fabric before it was even dyed. I had already divided it up into sections and folded it before changing my mind. Oh well. Because I wanted to make the seam allowances behave themselves I decided to top stitch pretty much everything, which also tied in the extra seams and the white parts of the shibori visually.
I still ended up with a frock. Front then back below. It’s cut to be shaped but still quite loose which is comfy and as flattering as possible for the iso belly I’m still carrying.
The pockets manage to be fairly stealthy, achieved by pleating that piece to match the skirt pieces.
Of course it is really just a winter version of this summer favourite made 3ish years ago, written up here https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/25/indigo-rays/ and worn a great deal since.
and proof the new winter version fits on me. Yes I know it’s well off the vertical. I took a bunch of photos and this was the best despite the kooky angle.
Montjoye Makkinstuff 