When Blackbird Fabrics had their annual holiday sale at the end of last year, I didn’t hesitate to snag some staples as I was desperate for some retail therapy since I generally don’t spend much money outside of grocery, thrift and fabric stores. Having received norovirus at Thanksgiving, Covid for the first time a week later, and news of a friend’s cancer diagnosis soon after, all while navigating the bottomless grief of a separation from my beloved partner of 18 years, the sale was timely for my accompanying holiday blues; nothing can take the sadness away, but even sadness needs a break from being centerstage all the time. I bought a few beautiful solid colored textiles in my color palette, including a deep green corduroy that I must have had plans for when I initially ordered it but completely forgot about by the time it arrived.
I realized I had made some bright green corduroy overalls last winter that I loved and wore often so I steered clear of pants/jumpsuit silhouettes and, after rifling through my pattern stash, settled on McCalls 7996, a pattern I had seen one of my IG favs Grace (wzrdreams) discuss in her stories years ago, which is why I bought it. The pattern is a collared button up dress with a curved hem, prominent breast pockets and a slightly flared skirt, but it’s wow factor is the topstitching, which looks amazing paired with the suggested fabric of denim. I knew that my corduroy would be stable enough to lend itself to the mid-to-heavy weight fabric the pattern called for, and I loved that it would give some added texture to the overall look. For some reason I was much more excited about this dress in an unexpected fabric like corduroy instead of denim.
I decided to add some length to my dress to make it more winter-appropriate and give it a bit more of a bang, and I also shortened my sleeves significantly; as a petite person, they are always a bit long on me in Big 4, but these pattern pieces looked way longer than normal when I positioned them on my body- I was going to need to take off over two inches of length! I started to doubt my adjustment right before I cut out my fabric but when I happened to take another peek at the pattern envelope, I realized that they had rolled up the sleeves of the dress on the model in the photograph, which is definitely a big red flag for me- anytime the pattern company has adjusted and “styled” the look of a garment on a pattern envelope instead of showing it plainly as originally designed and sewn, you might want to question the motivation behind it. In this case I think they did it because the sleeve length was also too long on the model. The length that I ended up taking out was perfect and the sleeves hit me comfortably at my wrist now.
I had to carefully squeeze the pattern pieces onto my fabric since I didn’t order quite enough for this dress, and that meant playing Pattern Piece Tetris, which I am pretty good at these days. I ended up using a similarly green colored thick, slightly stretchy cotton in my stash to accommodate some of my facings for the button bands and collar band that I couldn’t get onto my corduroy yardage, and I also had to stitch together my main fabric button bands out of two pieces of corduroy; thankfully you can’t see the additional seam!
Putting this dress together was pretty quick and easy (although there was some questionable instructing for the V of the back piece) and I was overjoyed to see how good the gold topstitching looked against the forest green of my fabric- I particularly love the detail of top stitching the dart lines on the front and back bodice. But things turned wonky once I got to the button bands, which you are instructed to topstitch on either side. I didn’t face this issue too much on the other parts of the dress, but because the button bands are long and the wale of the corduroy on them is vertical, the topstitching looked *atrocious*. The stitches can either go on top of the wale of the fabric or in between the wales, and both have a different impact- when on top of the wale the top stitching looks bright and bold and even, but when in between the wales, the stitches kind of sink into the ditch and look smaller, thinner, less vibrant.
So if your wales are not perfectly placed evenly along the entire length of the button band (spoiler alert: mine weren’t!) then the topstitching looks very uneven. And even if they were evenly spaced, sewing a perfectly straight line either on top or in between the wales would have been really, really tough because the wales are so thin. I tried over and over again to figure out some magic trick to get them to look nice and tidy but once the whole dress was constructed and I got the topstitching as even as I could, those wonky lines on the front were still all I could see. I realized that the impact of the top stitching on all the other parts of the dress had enough impact that I could simply ditch the gold top stitching on the button bands and trade it out for topstitching in the same color thread to make it look invisible. So I undid all that stitching! Took forever and was such an annoying waste of topstitching thread but not as much of a waste as if I never ended up wearing this dress because it didn’t look quite right. I am pleased to say that the overall look on the dress was not severely impacted in the least.
I struggled a bit with picking out buttons, as I am weening myself off of big box sewing supply stores and trying to support my local non-chain store businesses as much as possible (especially as Joanns is likely to be out of business soon anyways). I am so lucky to live in a city with other options besides just Joanns (which will be gone soon anyways) but I admit that I can get lazy when it’s only a 15 minute drive away while a lot of the great downtown fabric and notions stores require more time and traffic to access. However, Remainders Pasadena, my local craft thrift store, isn’t as far away as downtown, and I am usually successful there when I’m looking for something sewing related. Their selection is of course pretty small as their stock only comes from donated items and there are some things, like top stitching thread/thread in select colors, that are highly unlikely to be available when you need them. But I was lucky to find some buttons that worked well enough and spent maybe $2 for them. Are they the most perfect button for the dress? Nah, I probably could have found something really excellent at Joanns or elsewhere, but the buttons aren’t the focal point of the garment and it’s a small price to pay (literally!) to support a small reuse business, and what’s more, a much more environmentally sound one, so I am happy with what I got.
I only discovered this past year what an outrageously good color combination green and blue are. They have to be the right tones, but these cool-colored grayish blueish-minty boots are so stunning with the deep green of this corduroy don’t you think? (The boots also look amazing with the olive green dress Nina Ricci vintage VPO dress I made many years ago.) The dress itself reminds me of something Dolly Pardon would wear back in the day, and the forest green and grayish sky blue of this outfit reminds me of living in Vancouver, that stark, vibrant rainforest against a vast stormy background of sky. It takes me back to living there with my partner for several years, a remarkable and dramatic geography that was so foreign to me having grown up in the south. I was on an adventure there with my very best friend, delighting in new, sometimes exciting and sometimes scary experiences. 18 years is such a long time to love someone as fiercely as we did. Even though I have never known a sadness as deep as the one unearthed by our separation, not a day goes by where I don’t feel eternally grateful for every single moment of love we got to share with each other. I wish I could tell you about all of them. I could fill a library.
Happy sewing.
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