The Joseph Dress

Hello all! I have something fun to share with you today. Freshers week has just finished at my uni and one of the events was a dress up party. We all had to dress as something beginning with the letters R, B or C, because my uni is called Rose Bruford College. I had a couple of ideas, ranging from cowboy to clock, but when I looked through the fabrics I bought at this years Sew Brum it was obvious. I had to be a rainbow.

I bought five metres of a poly fabric at Sew Brum in five different colours for a fiver. I chose green, turquoise, purple, red and navy. They were intended for 5 little cami tops in different colours that would go with everything.

I still wanted to use the fabric after it was used for the costume so all of the sewing was done along the edges of the fabric and no cuts were made. The orange fabric was leftovers from some harem pants I made for a friend for the same night. (He won the prize by the way!)

The sewing was very very simple. I tied the corners of each colour together at the shoulders, measured how deep I wanted the neckline to be and then inserted the orange panel at the centre front. I then measured how deep I wanted the armholes to be, and then sewed down the rest of the edge of the fabric for a side seam. All in all this dress only took 5 straight lines of sewing.

I used the selvedges for the necklines so they didn't have to be finished, and hoped that everyone would be too drunk to notice the lack of hem.

Then the tent dress was cinched in by a fantastically 80s elastic which I tied round my waist for a belt.

When I twirled up to my housemate's room for her to examine it she noticed that the rainbow was not in order, so I unpicked the side seams and swapped the turquoise and purple round with a cheeky French seam. Then I just had to sew back up the side seams and everything was politically correct.

It is funny that even though this dress is such a quick and simple sew, just how much of a statement it makes. We got quite a few funny looks when we walked down the meadows for pictures.

It worked very well for a night for dancing and fun and I'm happy that I can rip each piece of fabric back to its original state and make what I intended.

Thank you for reading and a massive thank you to Abby for being such a wonderful picture-taker and director. Also thank you to Kristen for letting my hijack your walk with blog photos!

Lauren xx