A Fruity Maya

This, my dears, is my favourite summer dress.

If it's clean, I wanna be wearing this dress! The fabric is a stunning cotton linen blend from my Spotlight Christmas gift haul. I adore it. Wish I had more fabric and in the other colour-ways too. My sweet friend Jillian, made the most gorgeous culloutes with the blue colour-way.

I thought the linen content would make the dress a crumpled nightmare, but not so. Yes it needs a light iron after washing but I don't feel the need to carry an iron around with me when I wear this! Side note: this would never happen as I am totally allergic to ironing reallly.

The pattern is amazing. It is the very talented Marilla Walker's Maya dress/Top pattern

I love a pattern that has multiple options in one design. I have plans for a few of these! I chose the most simple dress design as I really wanted the fabric to shine and I didnt want to be breaking it up with plackets etc. I followed the instructions pretty much! The only things I did differently was to hand-stitch the facings down around the neck and armhole and the hem. I don't personally like the look of visible top-stitching, not least because mine is never very neat and it ends up looking a bit shit!

I fiddled with the hem slightly, pretty short at the front and curved slightly longer at the back. I like short dresses but don't want to be worrying about flashing people, so longer at the back is a really perfect shape for me. I love the shape of this dress, the way it is quite boxy and falls straight from the shoulder. I might even go down a size around the shoulders next time and try and get an even more defined shape!

I also added bigger pockets. The pattern piece is more suitable for a shirt pocket rather than the gert big pockets that this mumma likes for carrying around all the "treasures", snotty tissues, half-eaten banana's and other delights that I constantly find about my person :). I used the pattern piece as a template and just added a couple of inches all around!

Speaking of pockets....POCKETS! Can you spot them!?

I spent awhile pattern matching, and they are pretty dam perfect I reckon. I like to challenge myself to do something different/new/hard on each make and perfect pattern matching was it on an otherwise simple dress! Really stoked!

Anyway, not a lot else to say. Other than I DID put a little bit of thinking into beaver placement issues. But at the end of the day, with a design like this I was always going to have some issues. But actually I don't give a hoot. I am frankly too old to care!!

The last day of summer celebrated with a summer strut ;) I made this dress awhile ago and have just been slack blogging as per.

From now on in I will be enjoying sewing with winter weight wools and other such lushness. I love layering, so am not at all sad that Autumn has blown in from stage left... x