Aug 19, 2011

Chevron-striped jersey dress...and a great day out in NYC


This kid is always stealing my spotlight
I'm not one to wax poetic on New York City, but sometimes you just gotta love living here. Not only do we have the greatest fabric stores, with amazing cheap finds like this super-soft, vintage-looking, orangey-coral-reddish striped jersey I picked up at Chic on 39th Street last weekend during the First Annual Male Pattern Boldness Day (I'm hoping if I say it's an annual event enough times, that will make it so), but we also have so many great places to wear the cute little dresses we sew up from said finds. Like the NY Water Taxi terminal on Pier 11 (pictured directly above), and the solar-powered carousel at South Street Seaport (pictured below), just two of our stops today on an epic family jaunt around the city.

Lucy rode the rooster, the
 It was a lovely summer day in NYC, so we did something we'd been meaning to do for a while now: took the free water taxi to IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was a super fun ride, and Lucy shrieked with glee every time we hit waves. We had a cheap lunch at IKEA (kids eat FREE), Lucy played with all the toys, and we picked up a couple household items we needed. Plus Ryan snapped a few pics of me in the jersey dress I made this week:
The front
The back
Then we rode back to Manhattan, where we'd promised Lucy she could ride the carousel. We made it in time for the last ride of the day. Phew. That thing was fast. I felt dizzy by the end. The trials of parenting.
An all-white carousel is the perfect place to model a bright red dress, right?


Following that, we went to the nearby Imagination Playground, but not before snapping off a couple more pics near the docks.  I draped the bodice for this dress on my dressform, then made a pattern, and sewed the whole thing on my serger. I didn't overthink the skirt: it's just two rectangles sewn together and gathered. But it turned out beautifully. I blind-hemmed the skirt with my serger too, and I just love the bounce to this fabric. It moves beautifully. I don't think it looks like a jersey dress, but it's so comfortable, and held up really well to a full day out in NYC. Note the chevron stripes created by cutting the bodice on the bias:

I'm from an island. What can I say, I love boats.
Real models don't smile, do they?
Our kid is such a fucking champ. She can spend a full 12 hours out exploring the city, and she never loses her shit. At 8 p.m. she was happily enjoying a peanut-butter bagel at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca (we walked ALL the way there; I just mapped it and it was 2.66 miles/4.3 kilometres). That kind of stamina is going to serve her well one day. I don't know if we deserve any credit for that, but if someone's handing out medals, I wouldn't turn it down. That was our day. How was yours?

3 comments:

  1. I want that dress to be a part of my life. Well, maybe one just like that but in my size. You rule.

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  2. The other great thing about New York is that there are so many good backdrops for photos. It's like having your own movie set since it basically is a movie set. I personally like the photo taken with the grass on both sides of you. And you're right, the dress does have great movement. Can I say that without sounding pretentious?

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  3. I can't get over this dress. Perfection in so many ways.

    ReplyDelete

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