Corduroy Contemplations: Ottobre Art Teacher Dress and another Esme

It's two years to the month that I made my first Ottobre Art Teacher dress and I can't fathom why it's taken me so long to reprise this super sewing pattern. The dress is a very quick sew and easy and comfortable to wear. It's perfect for the autumn and winter months and I think would work well in heavy linen, flannel and denim as well as corduroy.

This is my third Art Teacher dress (I made a second one in fleece) and I have to say it's pretty perfect in corduroy. The fabric is a Japanese cotton needlecord bought from Worthing's More Sewing last week.

It had been a while since I visited the More Sewing shop and the selection of colourful quality fabrics they now stock is a delight. On my recent visit the small shop was packed with women attending a dressmaking course and I'm sure the convivial atmosphere contributed to my carefree fabric splurge. I also bought some turquoise printed corduroy from which I made another Esme dress.

An Anti-Beige Ottobre Art Teacher Dress

Getting through the colder months with greying hair and sun starved sallow skin – without looking completely washed-out and middle-aged – is a challenge best tackled by wearing more colourful clothes. So having bought some crazy coloured chevron fleece fabric from Brighton's Fabric Land (unsure whether to make cushions or clothes with it), it dawned on me that making a fleece dress in this bright material would solve so many problems.

I've made it into another Art Teacher Dress from Ottobre Design's Autumn/Winter 2014 magazine.

As before, the pockets in this dress design are perfect, and lovely and soft to the touch in fleece. I cut the multicoloured chevrons in different directions, machine finished the hem and sleeves with a fancy topstitch and used bias binding for a neat neckline.

Fleece is so quick and easy to sew – no fraying seams! And did I mention how warm and cosy it is? Fleece fan John Shuttleworth would be thrilled to pieces with such a sensible fabric choice, I'm sure. I still have enough fabric left over to make four cushion covers (for Xmas presents), so will be spreading the fleece love this Christmas. Fleece Navidad indeed.

Ottobre Design: Art Teacher Dress

With four days left of October I am in time to blog a second seasonal make from Ottobre Design's Autumn/Winter 2014 edition. The Art Teacher Dress looked very appealing (and easy) and I had some suitable fabric in my pending box – a floral corduroy bought last winter in the Ditto Fabrics sale. This time my long-neglected tracing wheel sprung into action and wheeling out the pattern pieces onto a piece of tracing paper was a smooth process - there are just four pattern pieces to trace out (and a facing) for this dress.

The Art Teacher is almost identical to the magazine's Miss Sporty dress, but with a much more charming name! It's a boxy straight seamed tunic with three-quarter length wide sleeves and two small kangaroo pouch pockets on the front. 

The pockets remind me of Dress N in Stylish Dress Book Volume 3 (another frock I must get round to making one of these days) and are inserted into a horizontal seam on the front. My material is a stretch corduroy so I cut out the back panel in one piece, dispensing with the need for a zip – the neckline leaves ample room to pull the dress on over the head.

I made two attempts at photographing the dress in my back yard and each time it clouded over enough to alter the stunning colours of this fabric. Only the close up shot of the pocket does the fabric justice, but you can get an idea of fit of the thing anyway! I love the easy shape of it. 

An October tunic from Ottobre magazine

Next to the latest edition of Angling Times in my local newsagent, I saw a copy of Ottobre Design. It's a title I'd not heard of before – a Finnish sewing magazine with bold, contemporary fashions for women. It looked positively other-worldly up there on the top shelf next to the mundane publications either side, a cheerful middle-aged woman with short white blond hair and trendy geek specs wearing a bright yellow zip-up jacket on the glossy front cover. A quick flick through and it went straight into my shopping basket.

 

I love that Ottobre's models are healthy-looking women of all ages and sizes. There are so many designs in this issue I'd like to make: the Art Teacher linen dress; Sammalikko printed leggings, Clean Lines techno jersey dress; but I started with the New Bohéme jersey tunic, mostly because I already had some suitable fabric so could get going straight away.

When I turned to the pull-out pattern sheet in the back I realised it was not going to be such a quick make. 

Confronted with an unfathomable mess of different coloured lines I did my best to follow and trace out the green line, while pausing to have a moan about it on Twitter. Angela came to my rescue for future pattern tracings directing me to Melissa Fehr's blog where she recommends using a tracing wheel with the pattern map placed on top of a piece of paper laid on a carpet or other soft surface so the tracing wheel has something to get its teeth into! This would've made the whole procedure easy-peasy and I'll be using this technique for future pattern tracings.

I used a knitted woolly textured fabric bought from the fabric stall at Worthing's Wednesday market, it has plenty of ease for this design and I wanted to make something that would be warm to wear. Ottobre's sewing instructions are clear and easy to follow and the tunic came together very quickly. It looked great on my mannequin but when I tried it on I could only just squeeze my arms into it. It looked and felt awful on me. I realised I must have followed one of the wrong lines in tracing the sleeve, so I lopped off the too-tight arms and just had enough fabric left to cut some wider sleeves (though a bit short of the required length). I unpicked the side seams then sewed on the re-cut sleeves Cappuccino dress style. I'm still annoyed that I drafted them out wrong but the finished dress is very wearable. Sleeve error apart it's a good looking garment and armed with a tracing wheel I will definitely attempt a second (third, fourth?) outfit from this ace magazine.