Thursday 8 August 2013

Sewing Project 2 - 'One-Hour' Sneaker dress

Second project is finished!! Yay! What a palava this one was. This time I downloaded a pattern called the 'One-Hour Dress'. It certainly did not take me one hour!

Making the pattern and cutting the fabric was easy enough and I was very proud of myself for doing so. The website has a downloadable PDF that basically walks you through it all.  I'm new to this and I found it reasonably straightforward.


I need a lot of space when I'm creating as you can see.


However, after sewing the front and back panel together, the foot pedal of my sewing machine exploded! Well, slight exaggeration, as I inspected my stitches, the sewing machine started moving without my foot on the foot pedal, I heard a fizzing sound and smoke started flowing out of the pedal! After turning it off my the mains, I turned to P (I'd like to say calmly but was actually quite frantic as I thought the machine was broken forever) who took apart the pedal and found this:



So, it turned out the capacitor had blown. Not wanting to risk, I reluctantly gave up for the night. 

The next day, P and I went to a replacement electrics shop, got a replacement capacitor for £2.50. Much cheaper than a new sewing machine! P replaced it for me. 


So, I was back to sewing!


Here's the finished project from the back:



I'm so lucky that you can't see some of the stitches, I have to remember that I am still a beginner and it's not going to be perfect. 




I like the length - not too long and not too short. Though, if I was doing this again, I'd definitely add pockets. 



I found gathering the sleeve really difficult and ended up cheating by adding elastic. Shh, I don't think you can tell. 



All in all, I am pretty darn happy with myself for this project and can't wait to move on to the next. Practice makes perfect. 



What do you think?