Today’s post is a shout out to my southern hemisphere blood. It’s the lovely Bondi dress from Tessuti Patterns.

And, while I don’t like to blow my own horn, I loooove this fabric placement!

Plus, it’s the best top-stitching I’ve ever done!

Alright, let’s start by getting the tiny details out of the way.

My Bondi dress is a straight up size 10. My body measurements suggested a size 12. However, I had read online that some people found the Bondi Dress a bit on the large size. This had also been my own experience when I sewed my Lois Dress, also by Tessuti Patterns. Luckily, the finished garment measurements for the size 10 are given. After comparing my measurements to the finished garment, I felt confident sizing down to a 10 in such a loose-fitting garment.

Fabric love

So this Bondi dress basically exists as an ode to lovely linen.

Because, surely, if anything deserves a bloody ode it is that fibrous wonder which is linen.

I’ve used two kinds of linen in making this dress.

The first is this unreal Wild Flower Nani Iro linen. I bought mine from Meter Meter. They have an amazing selection of Nani Iro – best in Europe in my opinion. In fact, if you don’t already follow Meter Meter on instagram (especially if you are Europe-based), I would highly recommend doing so. I bought this fabric after I saw a 40% off Nani Iro for a weekend pop up on their instagram stories, so it’s definitely worth keeping your eye on their feed!!

I’d previously sewn with the Nani Iro ripple linen (see post here) and this one reminded me a lot of it. It’s all about the way the colour appears to almost be stamped and painted onto the fabric in the most fascinating of ways.

The most wonderful thing about fabrics like the Wild Flower and Ripple by Nani Iro, is that there are so many interesting ways to potentially use the colours and borders.

I am a total sucker for a border print. Anyone else?

With my Bondi dress, I had a very clear idea that this was precisely the way that I wanted the front to look. With the centre coloured and the border part of the print along the side seams.

Achieving this look  required cutting the fabric entirely off-grain for the front. Not even on the cross-grain. But just completely off-grain.

So my solution, to ensure stability, was to entirely underline it with another fabric: in this case, cream heavyweight linen from The Fabric Store. I had bought this linen with the intention of re-creating a linen dress I wore to death in my early twenties. But, when it arrived, I was worried it was a little too heavy for that fitted, princess-seam project.

Plus maybe there’s a point in life when one should stop trying to recreate fashion moments from one’s early twenties. But that’s another topic entirely…

Turns out though, that the heavy weight is perfect for the Bondi Dress. It really gives the dress the bit of structure and ‘A’ shape that it needs.

Also, by way of shout out to the brilliance of heavyweight linen, in these photos, I’ve been wearing this dress for about 4 days, including having it crumpled in a suitcase. Seriously, for the three weeks I was in Australia recently, I I wore this dress every second day. I just couldn’t look past it…

For linen, it holds up so well against that evil specter of wrinkling!

Underlining away…

As I’m sure you all know, underlining involves simply cutting two of your pattern pieces, then sewing them together around the edges (within the seam allowance). In doing so, you basically create one ‘double layered’ piece. Which you can then treat as a regular single-layered piece of your pattern. I used the heavier weight underlining primarily to support the off-grain outer layer and add shape to the dress. In this particular instance, it also has additional modesty value, since the heavyweight base linen in entirely opaque. Not so easy to find in a white (or almost white) linen…

This is actually my first time underlining. I had been a bit worried that, since linen can be super wrinkly, perhaps two layers of linen for each piece would give me grief ironing the finished garment. I’m happy to report that the answer is no. The outside layer irons up just as crisp and nicely as if there was nothing underneath.

Colour block back

For the back of the dress, I just played around with the pieces of the Nani Iro fabric that I had leftover after cutting the front. I only had 1.5 metres of the Nani Iro, which is a narrow width, so I had tried not to get too fixated on a precise design for the back.

I had a clear idea that I wanted it to be mostly yellow around the back neckline. But I was thrilled to actually have enough of the border print left over to also use it at the bottom of the back of the dress.

For the back of my Bondi dress, I managed to cut either on-grain or on the cross-grain.

Nontheless, I still underlined everything to ensure that all my pattern pieces had a consistent weight.

The only part of the dress where you actually see the heavyweight linen itself is in the middle of the back.

Topstitch love…

Now, in addition to the golden colour-blocked loveliness, I am also so proud of the topstitching on this Bondi dress.

Even if such pride is entirely unwarranted, since skill had very little to do with it.

I have a confession to make. I always thought I was just kind of shit at top-stiching. I didn’t realise there were tools available to help you!

Like special sewing machine feet!!

When I bought my new Pfaff sewing machine a couple of months ago, I also bought the this foot which is specially designed to assist top-stitching on uneven surfaces. This project was the first time I’ve taken it for a spin.

Technically, you need to buy two (one for on the left and one for on the right). I was a bit sceptical about the whole thing, so bought just one to try it. I was able to make do with just one for this project, with strategic placement of my work under the machine, but I will probably end up investing in the other one to ensure full capacity.

With this foot, a groove holds the raised edge of the fabric in position and then sews a perfect line parallel to it.

Plus, top-stitching is additionally facilitated in that my new sewing machine now has a triple straight stitch which looks ‘top-stitchy’ enough that I don’t feel the need to play Russian roulette about with actual top-stitching thread or needles.

Basically, it all makes top-stitching a breeze, rather than an ordeal.

Yep, one, happy little top-stitcher here.

Oh, but one little word of warning about getting too top-stitch happy!

I was enjoying top-stitching everything so much, that I decided I also wanted to top-stitch my side seams. I got about half way though top-stitching one side seam before I realised, ummm, duh, it was going to be really difficult to top-stitch all the way to the bottom because the opposite side of my already-fully-assembled dress would be in the way. I’m guessing it would probably have still been just about physically possible, at a stretch, by ‘stitching in a tunnel’. After all, if I top-stitched a seam on a fully assembled sleeve when I sewed the Fairfield Button Up, this should be possible, right?

But, at that point, my needle got all jammed up – perhaps sensing my emerging anxiety, and I decided to just let it go…

Does that ever happen to you? I swear sometimes my sewing machine can sense my fear…

Ummm, I was too lazy to unpick that little mess though. So don’t tell anyone that there is like half a top-stitched side seam under my arm on one side. Our little secret… Eventually, it will unravel itself, right….

Bondi Dress: Mods on the go…

At the outset, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sew the longer or shorter length of the Bondi Dress.

I cut the longer, to be on the safe side.

Then, once it was put together, I decided to shorten it by about an inch, which basically puts this Bondi Dress exactly in the middle of the short and long lengths of the pattern.

If there is one thing I would consider changing, it is perhaps the pocket. At least for this fabric. The pockets are basically a patch pocket, but placed on the garment’s inside. The topstiching around the pocket’s outer edge is visible from the outside.

Due to my fabric, the top-stitching blends in too much around the white part and then suddenly stands out for a couple of inches in the yellow patches. Whilst I think the visible top-stitching is a nice feature in a solid Bondi Dress, I should have made these regular in-seam pockets for this fabric.

The only other little change for next time is that the armscye comes up a little high on me. I will lower it by about a cm next time round.

Oh and the only ‘simply lazy’ modification is that I didn’t use the pattern pieces for self-bias binding to bind the neckline and armholes and just used the store bought stuff.

An almost dream….

Ummm, so, in conclusion, I love this dress soooo much. I

I had been hoping to indulge in the sewing fantasy of wearing my Bondi Dress into Tessuti fabrics to visit when I was in Australia recently. But we were only in Sydney for 1.5 days, directly off a long-haul flight from Europe. It was the French hubby’s first ever time in Sydney and he would have killed me if I tried to drag him to a fabric store (or left him alone with the jet-lagged toddler), fresh off the plane.

But I did wear it elsewhere in Sydney! Including it’s namesake- Bondi beach!

Maybe next time for Tessuti…

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.