365 : liberty dress + patterned tights + hunters

Three of my favourite things together.

Liberty of London Summer Challenge : Project 6
Stylish Dress Book : Dress “S” in Zain Liberty of London Tana Lawn

If you have a sharp eye, you’ll catch that I’ve done this dress before. It’s not often that I repeat a pattern, but I have fallen in love with this style. My “Little Stars” version has become one of my easy favourites. It is perfect for dressy nights out and comfortable to wear every day.

Your sharp eye might also catch that I’ve used the Zain Liberty fabric already, for my camera strap. I thought it would be great to make a ‘black-ish’ dress to transition to fall that I could wear with tights when the weather got colder. I love how some of these Liberty of London prints seem so wild and crazy up close, but from far away read as quite sophisticated.

The dress exactly is pretty much exactly the same as the other one. I didn’t end up taking the sides in at all, so the skirt is slightly more full. I like this. I also repeated my modification of adding several lines of shirring just above the waistline. It’s like wearing an invisible belt. I feel shapely without feeling restricted.

Keep your eye out for at least one more version of this pattern, I’ve decided it will make a great top with some minor modifications.

Liberty of London Summer Challenge : Project #1
Camera Strap in ‘Zain’ Tana Lawn Cotton

My first Liberty of London project is a simple one, but damn, does it ever make me happy. When I got my Nikon camera last year, the first thing I wanted to do was make myself a new camera strap. I cringed every time I looked at that black and yellow strap.

I planned on making a new strap from scratch and this is likely one of the reasons why this project was so slow to get off the ground. As I thought about where I would get all the right hardware to do this properly last week, I realized that it would be much much easier to just re-cover the existing strap. Sometimes there’s no need to go building something from scratch when you can just hitch a ride on something that works perfectly fine.

How could I resist having a posh Liberty of London camera strap? I chose the print called ‘Zain‘, which seems to be perfectly suited to being a camera strap, don’t you think?

Since this project requires only a small strip of fabric (approx. 4″ x 20″), it hardly seemed painful at all to cut into this precious fabric. I cut the fabric along the selvedge so that I could use the finished fringe as my exposed edge. I ironed fusible interfacing on the back to make it a bit sturdier. Next, I pressed a small fold along the two short sides and then put a layer of ‘Steam a Seam 2′across the back of the fabric. I carefully wrapped the strip around the existing camera strap, overlapping the fabric with the selvedge edge showing. Using a hot iron, I pressed the fabric covering the strap to activate the ‘Steam a Seam 2′ and glue the fabric to the strap. The last step was to sew/quilt concentric rectangles along the length of the strap to secure the fabric to the strap.

I’m so happy. It’s the prettiest camera strap I’ve ever seen and it will be perfect for Paris. We leave a week today!