Sew Weekly Theme: Colette Patterns!

This week, I've been working on my Sew Weekly creation, and if you look at Mena's blog, you'd have seen it's a Colette Pattern: Spring Palette themed week. Because I'm a nerd, I love that Colette and Palette have equal letters, sharing the 'lette' in the final bit and it looks really nice and balanced written out. Also, because I'm also in the Southern Hemisphere, my chosen 'colour' palette will be more autumnal and about a fading summer.

Here's my collection of initial ideas of a fading summer, early autumnal in some of my stash fabrics. And it's my first 'disclosure' alert on my blog: as I'm a contributor to the Sew Weekly, and this week Colette Patterns is the first official sponsor of a theme, I was SENT this pattern for free to make up! OMG! It's probably also my first 'modern' pattern as well (for a long time at least, I did print up a Burda Style one a few years back), so it's very exciting.

If you're super keen on Colette Patterns, they've also offered Sew Weekly lovers a discount code, so you can sew along with us this week too!

I did want a red dress with some print features in the pockets and collar (I'm making the Rooibos pattern btw!) but I just couldn't shake this tablecloth with the big flowers! The tan/brown seemed a great base for the colour palette (not to mention those awesome flowers!), and then with this grey lawn (that I'd use for the pockets and collar instead) matched nicely.

Of course, after I 'locked in' my fabric choices, I discovered some challenges with the pattern placement. Cause the flowers are so large, and the skirt of the dress is gored (which means a lot of sections perhaps?) I wanted to make sure not all the red flowers were on one side, and the flowers looked the right way up etc. You know these old tableclothes, they have the best flowers in the corners and spaced evenly around the borders, and none in the middle of the fabric.

But guess what other 'bonus' challenges appeared on this second hand tablecloth:

Foodstains! 40 year old grease stains all over! So it was like a HUGE puzzle to make sure I got the best pieces of the fabric (the darling flowers) but avoided all these little stains. The saddest part was I when I realised the middle of the tablecloth (the bit I was saving for the waistband) had a terror of a coffee stain with some other yuk marks, that was faint, but still noticable. ICK. I'll show you soon how it all panned out and how I put it together!