Monday, February 1, 2016

Nautical by Nature

As I've probably mentioned before, The Boyfriend lives on a boat.  We spend most weekends working on it, which is part of the reason I don't have a lot of time to sew.  Anyway, I was perusing nautically themed fabrics, because that is a what a supportive seamstress girlfriend does, and I was disappointed by a lot of what I found.  Most of it is navy, instead of black, and a lot of the patterns are boring or would be too overwhelming as a dress.  Or the fabric is just plain uninteresting. Hall, if this post-30 sorta-goth chick is gonna wear nautical fabric, it's gotta be special.

I found this one, Anchors Aweigh by RJR, and it was long out of print, so I think I ended up picking it up on Etsy.  I love the old-style diving helmets and the knots (wanting to learn to tie knots was half the reason I joined Girl Scouts).  The whole thing has sort of a marine steampunk feel to me.

I don't know why I'm on a remaking old patterns kick, but this was McCall's 5094, the same pattern as the cherry dress.  Due to the weird layout this pattern calls for (the grain goes perpendicular to the selvage, rather than parallel), I shortened this a bit to make it work.  Think I will ever learn my lesson about double-checking the layout before purchasing fabric?  Neither do I.


I did the majority of this on Monday, my last day off of work from the snow day.  At the time of writing this, well over half of our three feet has melted and we're expected to hit 60 degrees this week.