{"id":11545,"date":"2014-10-17T05:00:29","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sanaeishida.com\/?p=11545"},"modified":"2014-10-16T22:19:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T05:19:09","slug":"franklin-dress-tunic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sanaeishida.com\/?p=11545","title":{"rendered":"Franklin Dress + Tunic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Happy Friday! There’s a new player in the indie pattern circuit, and I was excited to be invited to try out Brooklyn Pattern’s<\/a> brand new offering: The Franklin Dress<\/a>. Erin, the creator, has such a fascinating background (circus, ballet and opera costume designer!) and because I worked in theater for a while, I feel a kinship with her.<\/p>\n

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The Franklin dress has a vintage-inspired feel with a pleated yoke and puffy sleeves, and it actually reminds me of the many Japanese patterns I’ve pumped out to date. So obviously, I love the style. And when you pair a pretty pattern with an equally pretty polka dotted cotton, well…I’d call it a winner.<\/p>\n

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We had a prop situation<\/em> in that K kept wanting to try different ones, so I apologize that there are so many photos (and blurry ones!) in advance. She insisted that I include them all, and I am nothing if not an obliging parent. We started with a glass tchotchke shaped like a Hershey’s kiss.<\/p>\n

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\"franklin-dress11\"<\/a>Then we tried a gold clutch to match the vintage gold buttons on her yoke.<\/p>\n

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And we can’t forget the Scholastic book order form.<\/p>\n

But this was her favorite:<\/p>\n

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I love those metal letters. The Robert Kaufman dotty chambray is from here<\/a>, and it’s the softest, loveliest cotton. I cut a size 8 for K, and it’s a little long, but I don’t mind. I read through the instructions which were pretty clear (but maybe some steps were missing?). However, I find that I like to do things my own way these days, and I didn’t set in the sleeves but used my usual cheater method<\/a>; I also\u00a0basted the yoke and facing together to keep things tidy as I sewed. All in all, the whole dress came together easily. One other thing you may or may not have noticed…my pleats are facing outward instead of inward and this was purely my personal preference. Sometimes I get nitpicky about stuff like that.<\/p>\n

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And hey, why stop at just sewing the dress? I felt like a dose of color was in order, and wanted to see how quickly I’d be able to sew this if I eliminated the pleats as well as the pockets (which are part of the black dress, but I couldn’t get good shots of her showing them off), shortened the sleeves and made it into a tunic.\u00a0Can you guess? 1 hour and 44 minutes. I was a speedster because I only had an hour and forty-five minutes before I had to go pick up K. Got it done in the nick of time.<\/p>\n

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I’m not sure how long the black dress took. I did a rare thing and worked on it little by little over a four-day period — I never do this, because I’m impatient and want to get it all done in one fell swoop. It was actually super stress-free and very enjoyable. It was fun to speed sew this tunic too, though.<\/p>\n

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I’m liking the Franklin pattern! Oh, the cute apple fabric<\/a> was K’s find. Perfect for fall!<\/p>\n

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K made that necklace out of buttons she filched from my stash. She got sort of psychobabbly with her interpretation of what each button meant: “The green turtle is for envy, the purple is for magical emotions, the pink elephant is for happiness…”<\/p>\n

Anyway. Erin is offering a giveaway! Here’s the Rafflecopter snazziness, and it sounds as though you might need to “like” her facebook page? That world is a mystery to me. If you’d like to enter the giveaway, here it is:
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