I have long heard of September being the National Sewing month through years of countless email blasts from fabrics.com and joann.com but I haven’t actually bothered to look into the history of that until today so definitely a fun fact and this is what I learned, “The observance of National Sewing Month began in 1982 with a proclamation from President Ronald Reagan declaring September as National Sewing Month “In recognition of the importance of home sewing to our Nation.” (nationalsewingmonth.org)
As a tribute to Sewing month, I’m taking the opportunity to blog about a Cynthia Rowley inspired dress I created. Of course I added a few tweaks to it like a funnel/mock neck instead of the plain round neckline and picked a quatrefoil patterned jacquard fabric to construct it with rather than a solid fabric. In the past, my wardrobe was filled with solid colored frocks but now that I am getting older, I am leaning more to patterned dresses. I dunno what the psychology is behind older ladies and print but I can say I am definitely there. Lol.
The dress inspiration is quite obvious, the beautiful, statuesque lady in royal blue, and then there’s mini me. The length is just right for my own personal preference since I lean more on the conservative side. My version looks a little bit more stiff due to the weight of the fabric being a jacquard compared to her lightweight and flowier crepe which also has a better drape. I wonder if fabric softener would actually fix the stiffness. I haven’t actually tried that on jacquard.
Cynthia Rowley actually licenses her designs with Simplicity but I’m not sure if they carry one for this particular dress. I didn’t buy a pattern but drafted my own from a simple RTW shift dress sans ruffle hem with a few tweaks by adding more slant to the A-line than the dress I based my pattern from and adding the ruffle hem which was achieved by cutting a long rectangular piece of fabric. This was the most tedious part on this project since I manually did the ruching with the needle and thread. I liked the fabric so much I didn’t want to take a chance on the automatic ruching feature from the serger (which I admit I’m still quite a novice with the ruching foot) plus it gave me more freedom to make some adjustments so the ruched fabric wouldn’t come up short from being ruched too much to match the width of the dropwaist where it was to be attached.
If you have a stash of fabric just sitting there, go do something with it. If you haven’t sewn before, give it a try. It’s definitely quite rewarding.
[Image Credit: Main Photo – craftsy.com]