Hi I'm Meg, I'm the managing editor here at Seamwork and today I'm going to show
you the fabrics that we used for the two new February patterns. Haley designed two
dresses for you this month the Bertie dress and the Jo dress. I am going to
start by showing you the Bertie dress.
Bertie is a really sweet feminine shirt dress. It has an elastic waist, which
means it's really comfortable. A couple of other features that it has are a
v-neckline, a front button placket that goes all the
way down here so you can practice installing those buttonholes, and what
makes this dress really stand out are the sleeves. There's a little bit of
drama in these sleeves. They are full-length and they are gathered into
these really cool tied cuffs you can see here. This dress is really fun to sew so
you should also have fun when you're picking out your fabric. If you want kind
of a floaty, breezy silhouette like this one, you're gonna want to pick a
lightweight woven. A couple examples that you could use would be lawn, voile, rayon
challis. You could even use a silk crepe if
you're feeling fancy. If you'd like a little bit more body in your dress you
can pick a medium weight fabric. You could do something like tencel, you
could choose a cotton shirting, it's a little bit stiffer but it's still
lightweight enough that it'll hang nicely. You can even do chambray. You can
find chambray in a whole bunch of different fun colors and it's got a real
nice comfortable feel to it. And just because this is a dress doesn't mean
that you can't wear it in colder weather - you could choose something that will
keep you a little bit warmer like flannel. For this sample we used a linen
and rayon crepe from our friends at Blackbird Fabrics. We love Blackbird
Fabrics and if you're a premium or unlimited Seamwork member you actually
get a little discount code there so don't miss that when you're shopping. The
Bertie dress comes with a really fun member bonus version of the pattern. If
you're not really into those dramatic sleeves, you want something a little bit
more classic, this bonus version just has three-quarter length sleeves and they
are finished here with a cuff. It does not have the ties, so it has just a little
bit less drama if you're looking for something a little bit more simple.
For this member bonus sample we used a really fun floral print. It is a rayon
fabric from Cloud 9 and we purchased it online at fabricworm.com.
It is from a collection called Spring Reverie if you want to try to find that.
Otherwise, you can check out this month's issue and we will put a link in there to
this fabric. And now I want to show you the Jo dress. So Jo is an oversized pop-
over shirt dress and it has these really fun gathers along the front and back
yoke here, you can see that there, and that's what gives this dress a really
cool silhouette here at the shoulders. But overall it has a couple more details
I want to point out - there is a band collar here, there's a partial button
placket, so not a full button placket like there is on the Bertie dress, the
partial one here, and the silhouette is a cocoon silhouette, you can't really see
that here so we'll put in some pictures of the dress on our model, but it's got a
cocoon shape so it's got a real comfortable loose fit. That means you're
gonna want to keep this shape in mind when you're picking out your fabric, if
you've never sewn a cocoon shape before your fabric choice can really affect
that. Thicker fabrics are gonna have a more pronounced cocoon shape and more
lightweight fabrics are going to drape more on to your body, so it won't have
quite as big of a cocoon effect. For this sample we used a washed linen in Jade. This
is also from Blackbird Fabrics and I sort of have a crush on this fabric, it
is really, really lovely to the touch so it can imagine that it's also really
really lovely to wear. When picking fabrics for the Jo dress you can use all
of the same fabrics that I just talked about for Bertie,
you're just again gonna want to think about the silhouette that you'd like -
more cocoon: choose something with a little bit more body, less cocoon: choose
something that's a little bit more lightweight. In this month's issue we
have three pattern hacks for the Jo dress and this hack shows you how to
turn the dress into a really fun top. For this sample we used a rayon linen noil
once again from Blackbird Fabrics, it is another winner. This is a really easy
hack that you can do with a bunch of different dress patterns.
If you ever see a dress pattern that you like what's going on at the top of the
dress, but you're not really a dress person, you don't wear your dresses very
often, there's no reason why you can't just crop it into a top. We've done this
with a bunch of Seamwork patterns actually and we're really excited about
this one because it just makes a really great top. We do have a video on our
YouTube channel for lengthening and shortening, which might help you out if
you want to do this, or you can just check out this month's issue and in
Pattern Hackers we will show you how to crop this dress in particular into a top.
Alright those are the February patterns, we hope you love them, we're really
excited about them. Do you have any other questions about the fabric for this
month's patterns? Is there anything else you'd like us to be covering in these
videos every month? Please just comment and let me know below - we're happy to
tweak this video so that has the information that you find most useful.
Happy sewing!