Summer in the City Dress

After a long and busy summer of finishing my MA, moving house twice (!) and taking a brief holiday to Berlin (loved it!) and Norway (always love it!), I'm back! While I may not have been blogging much in the past, I have certainly been keeping myself busy sewing and have loads of new garments I want to show you, like my flowery Summer in the City Dress:

This is one of the many dresses I made this summer. It's self-drafted and made of a very smooth and high-quality cotton, which I bought last year on sale in a fabric shop in Norway. I lined the dress with a very light cotton fabric, since I wanted it to be breezy and easy to wear and care for.

The pattern is made from my standard dress sloper. I made waist tucks instead of waist darts to make the dress less clingy. The dress is comfortable to wear but somehow feels a little too short on me. I just like feeling my skirts down by my knees and am not used to showing *so* much skin. Luckily, I made small pleats in the bottom skirt part, so I can always make the skirt longer if I feel like it. Phew!

I inserted the back zipper by hand, a method I have used on all my dresses since I first tried it on my Purple Leopard dress. It doesn't take much longer than a machine-sewn zipper, gives you much more control in matching everything up carefully and looks all around better. What do you think? Why machine sew if you can do it by hand?!

I've also experimented a little with my blog design and added new buttons under the header. I find these buttons very helpful on other blogs for finding specific information you want quickly, so I thought I'd like to have them on my blog too. Please take a look and tell me what you think. Thanks!

Happy Sewing!