I bought the lovely vintage fabric from a fab little vintage shop called Copper & Corduroy when I was in Bristol recently. I keep spotting pictures of dressmakers being wonderfully creative with vintage table clothes and curtains, and I LOVE retro prints, but I've always struggled to drop on a fabric that's the right weight for sewing with. (No one want's a beautifully patterned, but starched to hell dress...) But this was just right - a soft brushed cotton, and it looked like it was in decent condition too. The pattern and colours are just dreamy, my phone pictures could never do them justice!

Just one thing I've found about sewing with vintage fabric... be ready for some hole dodging.

Like I said, I checked it and it looked in decent condition. It really was, but when I pressed it, I found a few little holes dotted around that look stress and damage from where the fabric had been folded. Luckily, some clever pattern piece placement meant that I could dodge the majority of them!

But as luck would have it, I went and pinned my CF pattern piece bang on a whole. So I had a bit of patching to do. I applied a bit of iron on interfacing on the reverse and then picked a matching thread to stitch over the hole and enclose the raw edges. I'm pretty pleased with it, but the print is so loud that it detracts from the patch job anyway, which is a good thing as I had a fair few more to do on the skirt. I positioned my pattern piece so the holes were clustered around the bottom of the back skirt pieces, where it would be harder to spot my patching.

The dress is made from a self-drafted pattern I've been working from and adapting for a while. You can see previous incarnations here (the Liberty one), here (the earliest one), and here (the party dress one). For the latest version, I adapted the neckline so it was round. The skirt is based on the Emery dress, with a decent amount added to the length - it's not quite as long as I've made it in the past though.