I had a sudden urge to make a tutorial, so here's a quick guide for a comfy summer dress

A couple weeks ago, someone on Reddit's sewing sub asked about making this dress, which is available from Threadsence:

Photo doesn't belong to me - it's from the Threadsence site

(Here's the original discussion for the curious)

This dress seems crazy simple to make, and (full disclosure) I haven't made it but drew up this guide for how I would go about sewing something similar. It's also some insight into how I figure out how to make something in my head/on paper before actually doing it.

"I am the darkness of space"

I mean, not really, these projects are pretty bright and colorful. It's just something I say sometimes...

Anyways, I finally got around to making those space suits!

I will underestimate the size of my legs forever...

...but at least I can finally make this top consistently!

A few months ago, I made a wearable mock-up of a full body suit/ catsuit. It worked out fairly well so I ordered fabric for the final version. With that, I got a yard of this awesome galaxy print poly/spandex to play with.

I wanted to make some tights using the new fabric and the bodysuit pattern, since the legs on it fit very well. (Can you tell where this is going yet?) The fabric is a lot stretchier than the previous one, so I foolishly took out a bit of length while cutting out the tights. Bad idea. The legs ended up much too short, and I had to chop the feet off to make them at all wearable. At least they still work as leggings!

The Care Bears taught me how to touch my toes

I used to love watching the Care Bears when I was a kid, and I'm not a fan of their new slimmed down reincarnations. When I saw this curtain panel with the chubby bears at a thrift store, I knew I had to make a skirt out of it.

Hello, kitty.

I've made quite a few of these faux fur hats with animal ears (foxes? cats? something pointy, for sure... except the bear one that is) but these are slightly different and I haven't posted in a while. It's super cold here now, which is pretty discouraging when it comes to going outside in skimpy dresses and skirts to take pictures of them.

Yes, this is another circle skirt.

One of the stores I go to regularly has a large selection of this shiny spandex that I keep using. I've posted 5 projects with this fabric already, and can tell you there's at least one other I didn't get pictures of. (For the curious: these skirts, this fitted dress, and these two circle skirt dresses.)

Recently, they had this variant of it that has dots cut out. I know I make a ton of circle skirts, but I really wanted to make something I would definitely wear with this awesome fabric. I had some trouble deciding what color to line it with, and eventually went with this bright yellow/green.

How many times have I said I'm not making another hat?

Every time I make a new type of hat I tell myself, "never again." I've even started telling my friends to stop me. It's always a crazy fiddly mess.

No matter how many times I say it, I inevitably make another hat. Half way through this one my serger just quit. It was also my first time working with PUL fabric. Great!

One of my friends asked for a warm, waterproof winter hat and sent me a bunch of pictures of helmets (the armor type) and some knit hats. From that we came up with an actually technically possible design for a sewn knight helmet hat with a movable visor.

(I asked Bria to help model again since she was available)

Vertical stripes > horizontal stripes

After I made the catsuit in my last post, I had a bunch of leftover striped fabric. I combined that with some leftover black spandex from this project to make a quick color-blocked dress. The whole thing is serged together, and I used my standard fitted knit dress pattern. (You can find the tutorial for it here).

You'll notice a strange collar in the photos as well. I saw some cool collars and other accessories made out of boning a couple weeks ago and wanted to give it a shot. More on that later.

Back to the dress: To figure out the color-blocking, I traced my plain dress pattern and eyeballed a line where I wanted the center panel to be. It follows the curves of the side seams on the dress, but slightly exaggerated. I cut on the line and made a note to add seam allowance on the new edges.

I'm longer than I thought.

This project was sort of a personal challenge. I've been making a lot of quick and easy spandex items on my serger this year, and wanted to see if I could make something more complex. A catsuit seemed like a good candidate, and I can use it for costumes, as long underwear, etc.

I own a catsuit in plain black so I started by tracing it to make a pattern. I figured tracing would work because there's a lot of leeway in getting the fit right with a stretchy fabric. The basic suit is 8 pieces: two front, one back, collar, a crotch gusset cut in half for a zipper, and sleeves. You might notice my suit has a couple more pieces, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Since this was sort of a "trial run" of this pattern, I didn't want to spend a lot on fabric. This was the best I could find that didn't have an obnoxious print and was reasonably priced, even though the stripes made it a little more challenging to work with.

[Some of the following pictures might be a bit nsfw.]