The Best Lady

Lovely Beth, of Marrickville, will soon be attending a wedding. How glorious. In addition to the already inbuilt gloriousness of a wedding, I suspect that this wedding is probably going to be a bit extra-glorious on account of the fact that a) it's at the Vanguard in Newtown, and b) the invitation looks like this

Furthermore, Beth is going to be the best lady at the wedding. Needless to say I was pretty dern excited when Beth asked me to make her a dress, and when the link she included in her request email suggested that she was a fan of one of my extra-special vintage patterns. You may have noticed that I find it hard to get past my favourite dress pattern, ye olde V neck-circle skirt 50s number. Especially when I have a superb circular tablecloth just waiting to become a circle skirt on a fab-o frock. I really enjoyed sewing for Beth - she was an excellent ladyclient! - most notably because she had a great idea of what she wanted, and what would suit her body shape. This is a huge bonus for a sewing-person like me, who is more often than not sewing things for people I can't actually see or try things on. Even with Florence's help, this is still a kind of tricky thing to do, so I love it when people can say "hey, I think I look rad in a full skirt" or not, as the case may be. Top stuff.

I was slightly nervous about using the tablecloth (even though I am in love with it, and had actually been saving it for my own personal use) because the bride had apparently requested no white, pink or red. But a bit of email back-and-forthing cleared this up. I'm glad, because whenever I hear "no red" I think "why??". Makes no sense to me. Like people who don't like beer...

In addition to aforementioned circular tablecloth, I also used a green sheet and another tablecloth that was cream with grey embroidery, which I used for the bolero. When I made the bolero, I was actually kind of keen on the cream and grey (what is happening to me??), but when Florence tried it on with the dress, it was kind of, how should I say, a little bit blah, so I embarked upon a little dyeing adventure.

Back in the day, I was a huge dyer or petticoats and what not. Basically anything I could get my hands on became rainbow coloured at the mercy of my special, dedicated dyeing pot and a cute little tin of dye. I cannot get my head around the fact that Dylon no longer make the cute little tins, and always struggle with the new-fangled sachets, but I get there in the end. Even after all these years of making things change colour, I still love the feeling I get when I see a billion items hanging on the line, all in the same colour. Beautiful. I get the same feeling when I go into op-shops that are arranged by colour. Why on earth would you not do that when it looks so freaking great??

But I digress...

Beth's bolero, we decided just had to be purple, to pull out the beautiful purple flower buds in the kick-ass circular ex-tablecloth.

I hope you'll agree, this was the right choice, and I was super-pleased with the resultant colour combo. I also love how the dye pulled out the embroidery, because it's a bit unusual and a bit beautiful, I reckon.