Typewriters

Dress: Handmade by Myself ; Shoes: Cinderella of Boston ; Briefcase: Secondhand

Last month, I made it one of my monthly goals to finish three sewing projects - one of those projects being this dress! I found this fabric at Treadle Yard Goods, my favourite local fabric shop, a year or two ago. They carry this fab Japanese textile brand called Kokka. Kokka's prints always catch my eye and I've yearned over this time and time again. When I found this teal typewriter print, I knew I had to make the splurge.

I wanted the dress to be something close-fitting because such a cute fabric needs to be in a professional, mature shape - not a full skirt or anything too childish. Since I'm a cheapskate, I crafted the pattern myself which I will never do again. I'm not skilled enough as a pattern maker. After I sewed my original piece together, I found several places where it didn't fit right, and it look so long to have to go back and add extra darts or shaping to get the fit better. But, after hours and hours of tedious work and fighting with my absolutely terrible old sewing machine (1960s Kenmore with huge tension issues), I came out with this lovely dress with questionable craftsmanship.

Example of poor craftsmanship - back fabric panels don't align very well.

I thought these flowers matched the dress perfectly! My favourite thing about the dress - besides the adorbs typewriters - is the colour combo! Teal & burnt orange - so beautiful! It reminds me of a '60s Pop Art design. The pattern that I was inspired by was a '60s Misses pattern for a professional sheath dress. I made my pattern tighter fitting than that one, but the design inspiration was a '60s Misses sheath to play up the young Pop Art-esque pattern.

I wore this to the office (with stockings!) on Thursday, so brown pumps were a must. I wore a red cardigan in the morning as it was a bit chilly, but it soon warmed up to a toasty 80 degrees and I didn't need to wear the cardigan around the office. Thank goodness I'm not working the same place as last summer - the air in that building was kept at a chilly 60 degrees. Bloody freezing sitting around doing office work in those temps, only to go outside and have it be 95 and humid out!

So the thing I was actually getting to with this was stockings. I wear nude stockings but I'm thinking as the weather gets even warmer, I might want to ditch the stockings and go bare legged. Does anyone have good tips on how to go bare legged but still wear closed shoes? Closed shoes - like the ones I'm wearing here - trap so much sweat and odor. I don't want to ruin a pair of shoes just trying to shed a layer in the heat. And sandals aren't an option. Let me know if you have any tips of the trade for this!

I found these adorable little tin plates at a garage sale the other day. Although I'm currently living with my parents (underpaid post-grad life, yay), I've been collecting tons of little things for my next living place. Pots, pans, upholstery fabric, little tables, a fan, wall art, etc etc etc. I think these little tin plates will look great in my future kitchen. My bathroom & kitchen are going to be ridiculously kitschy - I already know!

I'm spending my afternoon & evening working. The full time job I just accepted is for a political campaign, which means that a lot of the work is evening/weekend work, and hopefully some working from home. It pays next to nothing, and it'll be a ton of work, but I'm excited to get out there and learn new things!

Have a lovely Sunday everyone xx