When I first made a dress using Advance 9077 from The Vintage Pattern Company back in May, I knew it would soon become a pattern obsession if I didn’t reign in my desires. Well, turns out I could survive a few months before I absolutely had to make it again and my cottage core heart took over the project. Thus, we have todays creation which is an even more cottage-core dress using Advance 9077 and some very old fabric I have had in my stash.

For those of us who sew, it’s common to hold onto fabrics (also known as hoarding) until the right project or skills come along. Years ago, probably close to a decade at this point, before the internet was even scarier than it is now, I took part in a Gertie fabric exchange with some lovely ladies from the good old US of A. Due to copyright and other legal mumbo jumbo, Gertie was contracted with Spotlight (an Aussie fabric company) to design fabric collections which she has done for years and still continues to do so. These designs are only licensed to sell within Australia meaning that our overseas friends miss out. However, the same goes for Gertie designing fabric for American companies (I think it was Joann’s but I do not remember to be perfectly honest) which means that those of us outside the US can’t access certain designs ourselves.

To counteract this and to strengthen the bonds of sewists all over Facebook, the exchange was set up and I sent several meters of cute Aussie fabrics to a lovely lady and in return was sent some fabrics of my choosing. I remember getting a floral Gertie fabric and then this cute white cotton eyelet fabric featuring a blue mock-embroidery design which was mainly boarder print. I honestly do not remember anything about this fabric or even where it was purchased from, so I can’t share too much information but I absolutely fell in love with it and thought I would save it for the perfect project.

As someone who has always loved the cottage core vibe, I knew I wanted this fabric to become something soft, feminine and romantic. After living in my fabric stash for years and years, I finally figured she had waited long enough and I could use a pattern I tried out earlier in the year to turn her into the cottage core dress she has always dreamed of becoming.

Having made Advance 9077 before, I felt pretty confident that I could do this particular project justice. I was pretty happy with the final fit of my first attempt but recently I’ve been trying to get my projects to fit just a little better by adjusting the back length (which always seems a touch too long for me) and making sure the bust fit is perfect. Keeping this in mind, I began sewing my project. This pattern is pretty simple to follow but it can get fiddley when it comes to managing gathers and adding bias binding to the edges. The main challenge I had with this garments construction was that the cotton fabric was so thin and see through, I needed to baste on backing pieces to the bodice pieces with plain white cotton. This certainly was the best outcome as without it, the bodice would not have had as much structure, support and strength on it’s own as this bodice is mostly unlined.

One of the biggest parts of this garments construction comes from the need of bias binding and the making of shoulder straps. Using a little bias binder maker tool, I made about 41 inches of binding around 1.5″ thick. For the binding I made sure to use the printed fabric but it wasn’t the easiest to sew with due to the eyelets in the fabric. When it came time to making the shoulder straps, I first tried to make them out of the printer fabric but they fell apart due to the eyelets. So I tried several times to line them with white cotton but when it came time to turning them inside out, they always unraveled or the inside popped through an eyelet and became useless. After about 4 attempts, I gave up and just made the straps out of plain white cotton fabric and carried on with the project.

Due to the sheerness of the main fabric, I added a layer of plain white cotton as an underskirt so that no one would see my unmentionables as I went about my day. All this meant was I laid my printed fabric ontop of my plain cotton, basted them together and then treated the rest of the skirt as if it were just one piece of fabric. I did once again forget to add pockets but I was also on a time crunch and had some massive projects to finish before the year was out. There are future plans to go back and add pockets to a few of my garments, this being one of them as I genuinely love the dress.

The final steps of completing this variation of Advance 9077 was to add in a zip, sew in a final hook and eye closure and to unpick any visible basting/gathering threads (there were actually a few and I wanted this dress to be as clean as it could be). All up, this garment took me about two days to whip up and I’m really happy with the way it came out. Looking at it closely, I forgot to add the back hook and eye closure (which I only realised when I was uploading these images) and I also didn’t sew down the shoulder straps so they will need to be adjusted sometime in the future. This dress gave me all the cottage core vibes I had been wanting and I’m so glad to have used some very old fabric from my stash and I’m even more determined to bring my stash down by a decent chunk in the new year.

To celebrate the incoming summer, I photographed this dress against a wall of bouganvillia flowers which always give off a stunning bright magenta colour. It really is beautiful to stand amongst and of course, avoid as many orb spiders as possible. Advance 9077 has wiggled its way into my sewing heart and I want to already make another version of this dress but I think I’ll save it for some relaxing holiday sewing and yes, I already have the perfect fabric in mind.

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