There are those out there in sewing cyberspace who have low opinions of quilted, wearable-art type garments. They have inspired me to try to make one of my own, and here it is. The thing that strikes me the most about this dress is how understated it is. I felt like I was really going out on a limb with this project, and I was expecting it to turn into something remarkably beautiful or remarkably awful. I don’t think it’s either one. It actually looks sort of like a lot of the things I make.
The fashion fabric is a silk crepe that was a strange apricot color until I dyed it green. I hand-quilted it to some wool fabric as batting and another layer of silk for the backing. Then I washed it in hot in my machine so the wool would shrink, causing the surface of the silk to pucker. Before quilting, I tested all the wools in my stash for shrinkage, and chose one that I thought would shrink about the right amount.
My favorite sewing teacher hates green. He would forbid his students to use it because it does not photograph well. He is so right. These photos are awful.
The pattern I used was BWOF 11/99 #101. I remember buying this magazine at the newsstand expressly for this pattern. Apparently, it had to age a while before I could make it. The pattern is more of a shift. I changed the skirt a bit.
This project took me a long time because
a. hand quilting is really really time consuming
b. I’m working on my new years resolution project, which is to organize all the photos we have from my older daughter’s birth until now into photo albums. I have completed 2004 and most of 2005, after spending a billion hours going through and organizing photos.
EDIT — Only the bodice is quilted. The skirt is underlined, but not quilted.
dress back
dress front
Quilted fabric. You can see the 3 layers: fashion fabric on top, wool in the middle, silk lining on the bottom.
Rolling in Cloth 
3 Comments
I do like the idea of a quilted dress. Yours looks elegant and understated!
Your dress is lovely! I think the stigma with quilted garments is that they often look tacky and/or matronly, but yours is neither.
I like the idea of a quilted dress and yours is beautiful. I think the stigma attached to quilted garments is that sometimes the person who creates the garment gets carried away with the quilt or the art and forgets the wearability.
3 Trackbacks
[…] dress, blogged hereand here, worn with silk top that I made and did not blog […]
[…] a while, I have been enamoured with the double-skirt look. I mostly made this dress to wear under this dress. The skirt of the white dress will stick out a bit under the hem of the green dress. I can also […]
[…] dress blogged here. I took some of the embellishments off in the meantime. . Green quilted dress blogged here; white underdress, blogged here. . Print and lace blouse blogged here; patchwork denim skirt, […]