... navy linen casual dress

This website, I've been neglecting it! I admit, sometimes I go through a phase where all I want to do when I get home from work is have a glass of wine and watch Masterpiece Theater and be generally unproductive. But I have a backlog of fabric calling my name, so it's never that long before I start a new project. The weather is just starting to feel actually spring-like, so I decided to work with some navy linen to make a casual day dress. The casual dress is my go-to wardrobe element in the summer – I can never have too many! 

... party dress for a friend

 Remember that project I mentioned a while back? Finally finished! And it was a fun one. My good friend Hilary was throwing a surprise birthday party for her husband Tom and asked me to make a fun custom dress for the occasion. I rarely make clothes for anyone but myself, so it was a good challenge for me (not least because we live a hundred miles apart, so I couldn't fit her very often).

As inspiration, we used this Marc Jacobs dress Zoe Deschanel wears in the movie 500 Days of Summer:

picture from ASOS BLOGS 

Very cute, very expensive, very no-longer-available! But a good starting point. It took some searching to find navy eyelet fabric - I finally found some through an etsy seller based in Singapore. I was able to fit the dress to Hilary twice - once with a mock-up of the dress made of scrap fabric (which had an awesome 80's paint splatter print, incidentally) and once more with the actual dress before I put the zipper in. Behold, the result!

And the back, super cute: