Fabric Mart Fabricistas

The shirred dress! Have you heard of shirring? What is it? How do you do it? Today on the Blog I will be walking you through making your own DIY shirred dress, no pattern required.  Let’s get started. Shirring is when you gather an area of fabric or part of a garment by sewing elastic thread in parallel rows.  The elastic thread causes the fabric to shrink up.  It is pretty easy and gives a great comfortable fit to a garment.  First let’s talk about the materials you will need.  You will want to work with a lightweight fabric.  I did use linen from Fabric Mart for this.  I want to note, you will get different results with different weights of fabric.  The linen gave me a “chunky” look with the shirring. If you use a lighter weight fabric you will get very tight shirring, which is great too.  So take that into consideration when buying your fabric.  I personally wouldn’t go heavier then the linen I used but if you want to experiment go f...

Happy Thanksgiving!!! I hope that everyone is ready for a feast tomorrow! I know I am! I made a quick pencil skirt last week to wear to Thanksgiving dinner, although we usually keep it pretty casual on that day.

HI Fashionistas! The month of May is a month of celebration for me and my family. We celebrated my birthday and Mothers Day this past weekend, and my husband and I will be celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary this week. So for the month of May, I sewed up a voluminous pleated circle skirt in a beautiful red shirting fabric. Here it is: Initially, I had planned on creating a high low dramatic hemline, and that is what I was planning on wearing until mid of last week. But after trying it on, it felt very heavy and was not too flattering on me, so I chopped it off to an even hemline about 19 inches from the bottom of the waistband to get this look. The skirt is completely self-drafted and I will talk about that more in this post.  Here is the back view: A bit obsessed with these owl earrings lately.. I drafted the waistband for the skirt 1first. It is basically a rectangle. For the length, I used my waist measurement, plus 1/2 inch ease, pl...

Happy Holiday Peeps! Mori needed a Little Black Dress for  Holiday Gala and this is what I came up with. She had one major request for her dress and it was that the dress had to have a deep "V" front. I knew right away that I was going to use the top of Vogue 9253 and the bottom I used Simplicity 1559. I had used both patterns for prior garments so the fit was not going to be an issue. I picked this awesome scalloped lace and a stretch velvet, sadly both are no longer available but there are other options. I had to add a black mesh under the lace. The dress is fairly simple and you can make this in under 2 hours. We'll end this post with my pick for best picture of the bunch! I also want to share that my sewing magazine was released Nov 17th and I sold out of my first issue!  The second issue is on sale now and I have some great things lined up for this issue including a Project Runway alumni. Stop by an grab a cop...

Hi Fashionistas! I was so excited to sew with a beautiful yellow seersucker I found at Fabric Mart recently.  Here is the top I made: You see, I have been the slowest to catch on to the cold shoulder trend. I know, its been around for a while and is continuing into fall fashions.  I was meeting my hubby for pizza one night and had some time to kill. So I decided to do some window shopping when I saw and tried on this RTW top.. and loved it.  So.. I made a pattern... and found the perfect fabric. And made my own version! I really do love the tent shape of this top. It is very different than the usual type of garments I make and wear, which typically tend to be more fitted. The sleeves are so lovely.. here are some more pictures of the sleeve:  I drafted a facing and modified the sleeves a bit by removing the band at the bottom and hemming them instead.  I als...