From Red Velvet to Robin Hood

I’ve been working on some items for the Cake Patterns Red Velvet Sewalong. This is the Red Velvet Dress with a pair of Espresso Leggings.

It’s been getting dark earlier and earlier, as it does when winter is coming. The house is somewhat reflective, but we were just barely in time to get some outside pictures before it got too dark for anything to show up. Good thing this dress is bright enough to practically glow in the dark.

The dark, rainy-ness of winter was actually the inspiration for this dress. After we had a relatively large storm come through here at the beginning of October, I was craving bright cheerful colors to counteract the gloom, so I bought the brightest colored fabric I could find.

The print is ITY knit from fashionfabricsclub.com and the green is Laguna Cotton from Fabric.com.

As you can see, I probably need to do a deep bust adjustment for my next iteration of the dress (which will be striped). I thought I might, but with ITY knits being as stretchy as they are, I wasn’t certain that adjusting the bodice would land me in the right place.

This is my second pair of Espresso Leggings. The first were an aqua color, and match my stripey Tiramisu quite nicely, but I don’t have pictures since my thought w/ making them was that they were probably just test leggings anyway. They turned out just fine though, so this green pair is made up pretty much the same (just took an inch off the front rise at the top because they sat just that much too high). I feel like Robin Hood in these leggings.

The construction of the dress was pretty straightforward. ITY is a bit of a fiddly knit to work with, but I managed to pummel or pin it into submission for the most part. I wouldn’t recommend it as a fabric choice for someone new to knits, and I wouldn’t recommend the Red Velvet pattern as a first make for someone new to working with ITY. Adding in the cotton for the collar and waistband made it a little easier than it would have been if the whole thing was ITY.

I couldn’t resist making the pocketed version of the pattern. Such a clever type of pocket, almost perfect for going out. The zipper makes it much less likely that I would lose my ID while dancing around at a concert or something, and where the pocket sits, it doesn’t mess with the drape of the skirt the way side-seam pockets do sometimes.

I didn’t completely plan for the zipper tab to hang down on a black part of the fabric, it just worked out that way.

Here’s a close-up shot with the pocket open, so you can see that there really is something there.