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From Yves Saint Laurent 2011 Resort collection

(Picture taken from Project Rungay)

Model, if you could just smile a bit, please. 

No Pink & Red

BurdaStyle is having the Pink & Red challenge.  I thought about entering when it was first announced, but the 20-day notice is too short for me, since I sew only on the weekends.  This is what I was going to make...

... which is inspired by this gorgeous Trina Turk Algonquin dress (looooove the design but not so much the price):

I will still make this dress in different colors (not too crazy about pink-and-red combo anyway), and most likely without the big lace. Any suggestions on color combo, anybody?  What should I put on that curvy style line... Top-stitch?  Bias strip?  Some kind of small lace? 

No new fabric for the colorblock dress...

... even though I'm drooling for Robert Kaufman Radiance silk/cotton blend. Still nervous about dropping double-digit-dollar per yard of fabric.

So I dug around my cheap-o stash and found just enough miscellaneous cotton to make this dress:

• White Ikea bedsheet that I was using for amateurish photo backdrop, and later for muslin, and now it will be the skirt of the dress. It may be enough for a bias layout plus lining.
  
• mjb likes the chocolate-chartreuse combo (so do I!), but there's no existing chocolate cotton, and the closest I have to chartreuse is olive, which looks awfully drab. I do have a piece of red, which is enough for the bands.
  
• No gray cotton laying around either, so the bodice will be black Kona cotton that was meant for another project, and now it will be the bodice plus lining.

White skirt + black bodice + red band = looks like:

... which I think is the same dress as this:

... and this:

... which is a Spring 2008 Gucci.

Hm... I probably need to start making winter dresses after this one.

Two designs in one

All work and no play makes me extra fidgety. So, I took a break from studying, browsed some fashion mags, and saw this Rachel Roy dress worn by Lucy Liu:

Gorgeous! I've been wanting to make a color-block dress and this one just knocked my socks off. The colors are nice fabulous, and obviously the fabric some kind of fancy expensive designer silk. On Lucy Liu it looks elegant, on me unfortunately it would look matronly. I thought changing the skirt to bias a-line would make it less "proper".

So, that's the first design that inspires my next project.

The second one is AnaJan's Bordeaux dress that is also on my long to-do list:

Just the neckline, really, is what I like. So I'm adapting that neckline into my dress:

I choose red for the bodice, because orange is too "spring" and I want to be able to wear it in colder weather.

These are some neckline and color variations:

Next post will be about drafting the pattern for this dress from the sloper.