choosing a Dress Fabric for Elora
Do you remember the swatch service offered by The Confident Stitch?
It’s a subscription service that brings a coordinated collection of fabrics into your home each season on tidy, information-packed swatch cards. You can choose from three different subscriptions: Garment Fabrics - Cool Tones, Garment Fabrics - Warm Tones and Quilting Cottons.
Last month I received the autumn mailing and began thinking about a new dress for Elora. You really can’t help but be inspired to start a new project, with all the great suggestions on the cards themselves, not to mention the videos too! (If you’re curious, here’s the video for the fall Quilting Cottons card.)
Well, I had in mind to sew this Elona dress by Ikatee designs. Ikatee is a French company that publishes their kids garment patterns in both French and English. I sent this photo of the dress to Confident Stitch and asked them if they could recommend an ideal fabric. I’m an intermediate garment sewist, and one thing I have learned is that the fabric changes everything about the way a garment turns out!
Maisie at The Confident Stitch drew my attention to the Nikko Square Stitch fabric on the cool-tone garment card. It’s part of their collection of Diamond Textile Shirt-Weight Wovens. These fair-trade fabrics come from India. The medium weight cottons are more loosely woven than a quilting cotton, which gives a soft drape perfect for clothing.
There are lots of pretty colors, but I favored the Square Stitch in Rust. I like Elora in warm autumnal shades, which bring out the reddish tones of her hair.
This week, Elora and I printed out and assembled the digital pattern. As you can see, we’ve started cutting! During the process Elora convinced me to add a blue fabric to the dress, which may have been a crazy idea, but I wanted to support her creativity. Next time I should involve her in the fabric-choosing process. They grow up so fast into their own tastes, don’t they?
With any luck, we’ll have a finished dress to show later this week!