I sewed the Fibre Mood Emilia Dress two years ago and thought it was a really lovely pattern (advance copy of the pattern provided to me free of charge but I also purchased the magazine it came in!). Although, looking back, I do somewhat question my colour blocking choices and wish I had just stuck to a single colour!

Sooooo, what else could I do but make it again?

If you want more details about my thoughts on sewing this pattern, you might want to check out the original post.

All about the stripes

This time around, I’ve sewn the Fibre Mood Emilia Dress out of Two-Tone Stripe Twill Tencel from Meter Meter. This is the “Dusty Blue” colour way.

I knew immediately that the main thing I wanted to do with this dress was have some fun with stripe play.

Along the back of the Fibre Mood Emilia Dress, this was a no-brainer. A horizontal striped yoke with a vertical striped body is an easy choice.

Along the front, I decided to keep it interesting by placing the stripes in different directions on the left and right sides.

In the end, I’m really satisfied with how this looks and the best part is that it entirely alleviates the need for any stripe matching!

My Fibre Mood Emilia

My first Fibre Mood Emilia Dress still fits me so I jumped straight in and used the pattern pieces I already had cut out from a couple of years ago. That makes the version you see here a size 42 in Fibre Mood sizing.

But I will offer a cautionary tale for making decent markings on your pattern pieces when you don’t end up using them as cut. I jumped straight into cutting everything out, with the very limited amount of fabric I had and, only afterwards, did it cross my mind that maybe I should re-read my original blog post to see if I experienced any issues with this pattern.

Upon doing so, I promptly saw that, last time, while in the process of cutting, I had been struck by how small the sleeve piece looked so I had added a few centimetres to the sleeve, effectively cutting out a sleeve a couple of sizes larger and easing it in.

Yet, I had failed to mark this anywhere on my pattern pieces, so the sleeve piece I had cut out was the one a couple of sizes too small which would not even fit around my upper arm.

Yeah!!

I didn’t have enough fabric to recut the sleeve, so took a creative approach of adding a strip of about an inch wide to the entire length of the sleeve.

I forgot to take photos of the extra contrasting stripe work (I’m calling it a design feature), but you can see it peeking out on my right arm in this shot.

As my cuff had already been cut out (an it is only the upper arm where I needed the extra room), I then simply added in an extra pleat at the cuff to get it to all come together.

So, today’s lesson. If, for some reason, you don’t actually use a pattern piece as cut out, write something on it so you remember. And re-read your blog posts before you cut out a pattern for the second time, not after!

My other modifications

Fibre Mood Emilia, as designed, has an option for using elastic at the waist, but, after my first version, I had always intended to replace this with a belt to draw it in at the waist, so I’ve skipped the elastic casing.

The only other modification I made to the Fibre Mood Emilia was to add side-seam pockets. I was actually running desperately low on fabric when I was cutting this project out. I’d originally purchased plenty of fabric for this project, but it had been sitting in my stash a while and I eventually ended up using some of it to line my Jasika Blazer.

So I ended up using another fabric for the pockets but was worried it would be visible in little glimpses. I recently did a fabric de-stash – which I would highly recommend for making you feel as though you control your hobby and not the other way around – but the down side is that I no longer have as many scraps of fabrics for little things like this. The only colour I had for the pockets was navy and I was worried about it peeking out, since it was much darker than the main fabric. So I added little pocket facing of the striped fabric at the outside edge, so that it’s not going to be visible.

In the end, I really like this dress. It has turned out better than I had expected. I have to admit that this was actually one of those projects where I had brought the fabric more than a year ago and then somewhat lost my motivation.

So I had kind of forced myself to get started on this project as stash sewing. But, once I got started, I really enjoyed the way it was all came together and find the look put together and sleek but still interesting.

So I guess sometimes we can find inspiration from the things we already have!

Oh and a quick apology in advance for the quality of my photos at the moment! Where I live, it’s very autumnal and grey and I basically get no light whatsoever to take photos!! When the sun does come out, I rush to do what I can, but the sun is also really low in the sky and I get a tiny interval as it passes at the wrong angle between the roofs of two houses and then disappears again. Later in the year, it should be less grey and the tree casting so many shadows on my balcony should lose its leaves, making photos a bit easier, but for now it’s a bit of a shadowy mess. So apologies if it looks as though my legs have been cut off, there are difficulties in focus or there are random shadows of the camera. It’s bad photos or no photos for now!

Ahhh, life of a sewing blogger.

If you want to see more of my sewing adventures, you can find me on Instagram here.