Camouflage

My sewing space was recently featured over at The Blue Gardenia Blog. It was all cleaned up when I took those pictures. Now it looks like a tornado came through. Fall fabrics and patterns lying in piles all over the place.

I wanted an easy project after the Karl Lagerfeld jacket so I picked a pile with an autumn print knit and McCall’s pattern 6163.

The dress is described as close fitting, above mid knee length, with mock wrap front gathered at left side, collar, collar band, raglan sleeve, side zipper and stitched hem.
The poly knit fabric is from JoAnne Fabric and is a print type that I have heard called “a shadow print” because it looks like the shadows of a leafy branch. When I modeled the finished dress, my husband‘s first comment was “That looks like camouflage”. Not exactly the comment I was expecting, but it got me thinking about using prints to camouflage things. This darkish random print tends to hide body bumps which is good, but it also hides style details. If I didn't know it was there, I would never noticed the collar. It turns out the print's camouflage like properties were fortuitous for another reason. I had a sewing disaster making the dress. I laid it down on the table to trim the side seams, but it wasn’t laying flat and I inadvertently sliced into the back hip area.
I didn’t have enough fabric to cut another back piece. To salvage the dress, I cut a large patch from the same part of the print and hand appliquéd it over the cut, matching the print and turning under about ¼ inch seam allowance.
I turned the dress to the wrong side and trimmed away the fabric around the cut to match the edge of the seam allowances of the patch.
Then I turned the seam allowance out so I could see where my hand stitching just caught the edge of the fabric and machine stitched exactly on that line of stitches. I removed the hand stitches and pressed. Basically I inserted a circular section of fabric into the original garment matching the print, making it almost invisible. The technique was described in a Threads magazine article on insetting decorative shapes into a garment. I used the technique to patch my dress and the print helps camouflage the patch. This is a closeup picture, but to the naked eye it is almost invisible.
Wheh! I am glad I was able to pull the repair job off because I really like how the dress turned out.