Love Sewing Magazine, Lazy Days Summer Dress (issue 16)

Well, this is more of ‘Lazy Days Autumn Dress’, but my daughter is very happy with it nevertheless 🙂

I had plenty of leftovers from my Astoria, so was keen to come up with another project for this lovely material. I was tempted to run up another Coco top, but to be honest, think they would have ended up too similar. My next thought was the Mini Ruby for my daughter, featured in Love Sewing magazine, but when I refound the pattern I was disappointed to realise that it was designed for wovens only. After some further flicking, I stumbled upon this Lazy Days Summer Dress (also LS) pattern, designed for knits. The only problem was that it was designed to fit ‘an average six-old’. My daughter is seven and pretty tall, but it wasn’t too far out…

I found one of her favourite RTW dresses from Joules, which has plenty of length in it for another year (fingers crossed…) and used the dimensions from this to enlarge the pattern. This is the first time I’ve attempted to alter sizing but thought it was probably about time I gave it a go… I used my posh, new pattern paper I acquired with my G and G order, which made it a whole lot easier. Why haven’t I used this stuff before?

I had to use up every last bit of fabric, but I just about managed. 🙂 The construction of the bodice was really easy, much the same as the Astoria or Coco. I love it when you barely need the instructions and can just follow the order. However my tempestuous relationship with my overlocker reared its ugly head (it’s certainly a love/hate one, does anyone else feel like this about theirs?). Despite my best efforts, it was still producing what I can only describe as ‘gap-py’ seams, ugh! I’d paid a lot for this fabric, so I wanted it to last and forced myself to stop.

Although I haven’t had my overlocker that long, I have used it a lot so thought it was about time it had a service. There’s a machine shop right near my parents’ house, so I reluctantly handed it over to my Mum before we left for America (separation anxiety anyone?) My Mum must have used her Welsh charm on the man though, as he took a look at it with her and the bodice of this dress, had a quick fiddle with the dials and declared it a tension problem only. Within five minutes he’d fixed it and said it didn’t yet need a full service, refusing any payment! What a lovely man and I’ll definitely be sending my Mum back to him next time too 😉

So, much though I’ve been itching to apply all the great tips you all suggested to fix my problem jacket, I forced myself to finish this wip off before I got started. The much higher tension he gave me worked perfectly. It’s set at 2775 now, so I’ll definetly remember this for other sweatshirt weights. It was interesting that the settings on each dial were so different, I’d been tending to have them all pretty similar…

The rest of the dress came together pretty easily. I had to take a bit of width out of the skirt because of the thicker fabric, but other than that it was really simple. The only thing I’m not fully sure about is the waistband which has a tendency to flick up, despite pressing it firmly down with the iron. I may well stitch it down at each side to prevent this, but I think it’s just part of the design. It’s come up pretty big on her, but hopefully that means I can get two Winters out of it. She loves the look and fleecy-backed fabric as much as me 🙂

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