dress: self-made, pattern (which I hacked) here // shoes: Swedish Hasbeens 

*My Fabric Designs sent me fabric free of cost. All Illustrator work, thoughts, and opinions are my own. Except for the part where I copied the fabric from an Anthropologie dress.

You guys! I  have a fun new hobby. I was contacted by the lovely people at My Fabric Designs about trying out some of their fabric, which works kind of like Spoonflower. You can upload your own print, use prints offered on the site, or make your own print with their design tool, and have it printed on one of the 26 fabrics they offer.

They sent me a swatch booklet that has a swatch of each of the fabrics they offer, each one with some colors and fabric information printed on it. You can snag one of these for $5 and I highly recommend doing so so you can gauge the fabric and print quality before choosing your fabrics.

While they do have some really awesome looking prints, I was most excited about trying to design my own. I use the term “design” very loosely because my first two ideas were copycat projects. You may have seen peeks if you follow me on Instagram.

The first problem I ran into is that I had no idea how to use Illustrator. I watched about 7 Youtube videos and slowly started to figure it out. I also recommend the videos at Lynda.com (for wayy more than just Illustrator too, they have classes on all kinds of stuff). There’s a monthly membership access fee involved, but there are two ways around that. 1) They offer a 10 day free trial. 2) Check to see if your local library has access! Mine does, so I was able to log in on the library-specific Lynda login page with my library card information (NOT on the actual Lynda website).

Another hint: if you have one of the more recent versions of Illustrator (and a computer that can run it), it comes with a patternmaker software where you can really easily make seamless patterns! My 2012 laptop complained a bit but in the end we got through it.

Anyway, I’ve always loved the fabrics used in dresses at Anthropologie so I clicked around for a while until I found this one. I just love how it’s a floral sundress but between the flowers looking like insects and the color scheme, it’s really not overly girly.

Many hours on Illustrator later, I came away with this:

Pretty spot on, right?? My friend (who STILL has not given me the write-up on her Hunger Games butterfly dress) described it as like insect tea parties, except some of them are left out and lonely.

I also tried another color scheme:

I ended up ordering the yellow fabric in the Organic Cotton Sateen, and the lilac one in Cotton Poplin. It took a while to get to me due to the whole custom-printing thing; I think this order took about two full weeks. (I’m completely spoiled by Amazon Prime.) I also just received my second order that you may have seen on Instagram that turned out SO BEAUTIFULLY and I’m so excited to share that one.

In terms of the fabric quality, the number one issue I’ve heard of with fabric printing is the colors fading in the wash so the first thing I did was cut off a piece of each fabric and run it through. I used the permanent press cycle on cold and then hung it to dry because that’s how I usually wash my clothes.

I took these photos while the fabric was still wet, so they look a little odd. They don’t actually look smudgey in real life, just slightly faded.

There was some slight fading, especially with the purple print, but  nothing super noticeable unless you look at it really closely at the original. I want to test it out with more vivid colors too but for these lighter prints I’m happy with the way it came out of the wash. The only thing I wish they had was a zoom feature on the preview screen so you can zoom in on what your fabric is going to look like. I stupidly left the stroke set to the brown color of the flowers so there are thin brown lines that form rectangles all over the fabric. I tried to be strategic with where I put them and I don’t think they look super terrible but I kind of wish I’d been able to zoom in to see that they’d be there. Or that I had thought to check for that in Illustrator. *headdesk*

Onto the sewing! So far I’ve only sewn up the yellow fabric, but holy crap I love this stuff. It’s super soft and drapey and lovely. It’s a bit on the thinner side so I lined the whole dress (with muslin because I’m lazy and have a ton of it lying around for school so why not?). The cotton poplin is much more crisp and it’s absolutely perfect for the other dress I have in mind. More on that later.

I used McCall’s 6740, which I bought a few years ago and couldn’t seem to find the right fabric for. I added a waistline seam by hacking it at the waist, and then drew in yoke lines for the top edges of the cups (~1.25″ wide). I decided to leave out the cup shaping because it seemed too complicated and frankly it looks fine the way it is. To be honest, I probably could’ve found a more accurate pattern to go from but I already had this one and it was already traced so I just went with it. It does need more contouring along the top edge which I’ll definitely fix if I decide to sew this one up again.

The skirt was pretty simple. I just did lots of little pleats until it fit the bodice. Then I made two button plackets and sandwiched the side seams into them and added these cool brown buttons from Joann’s.