Summer dresses and a broach

I'm not a seamstress at the best of times, but I do like dresses. They always look too complex, and the one or two half-hearted attempts I've made to make a dress from a pattern has never been a raging success.

but... here's some outworkings of dresses inspired by the warmer weather, and some fun 'up-cycling'.

The first one is a too-big mans shirt from a charity shop, and a £1 t-shirt from a charity shop, merged together. Add a nice green belt and voila. No pattern required.





The second one is composed of a tunic that wasn't quite long enough and a sleeveless top that wasn't quite long enough. Add the bottom 3/4 of the tunic to the top, and voila, another dress. I particularly like this one, with a belt, it's got a good high 50's waist (and it looks better on)





The last one is made from ribbing fabric and just sewed it pretty much straight up and down, and cut it without hemming, because ribbing doesn't fray easily. It's my fun take on a 1920's flapper dress. The best bit of all is the flowers, which are just different sized circles held together with a button, which then inspired me to make a broach.








The Broach, again is just circles of different fabric, but zig-zagged to stop the fray from going past the stitching. Great way to use up sripbbits and scrabbits of fabric too pretty to throw away. In the meantime, I've got my felting mojo back again will be blogging soon about that... watch this space.