Me vs J. Crew : Knock it off

The idea of the Hide and Seek dress with a button placket was one that was handed up to me on a platter. There had been some discussion on the Oliver + S forum of how one could adapt either the Hide and Seek or the Cinema dress patterns to have a front opening placket. Then Rachel sent me a link to this pin....

I didn't just want to make a dress like that one, I wanted that dress. I mean, navy and white stripes, grey chambray, snaps... It was perfect. So I'm linking up with Elegance and Elephants Knock It Off series with my J. Crew knock off

I'd seen the perfect half inch navy and white stripe knit at the local super cheap Vietnamese fabric shop, but she'd sold out of it about 24 hours before I got there! Still, the J. Crew dress is listed at AUD$99.10. I could have spent that much trying to get the right size stripe posted from the US, or I could spend $8 on 1.2m of the slightly too wide stripe. Done.

The dress is the size 3 Hide and Seek with the length of size 4. Both the yokes and the skirt panels were lengthened to the size 4. It's exactly the same sizing as my first Hide and Seek dress and I knew with the interlock knit it would be plenty roomy enough.

To get the long sleeves I pulled out my School Bus sleeve that was already traced off in a size 4. The Hide and Seek sleeve was much wider and only comes as a short sleeve. I kept the sleeve cap of the Hide and Seek, drew a half way compromise in width and used the length of the School Bus to create my new sleeve pattern piece.

They turned out to be quite a bit too long and I probably lopped about an inch and half off the bottoms before hemming them. I can see now that this dress has a bit of a dropped shoulder compared to the T-shirt and that's probably where the extra length came from.

Since I didn't know if I was going to be at all successful I kept it simple and avoided doing the forward shoulder seam adjustment and curved inner back yoke that would have given me a closer match to the original dress. Yeah, lazy I know. :)

The only other modification was to cut the side panels a little off the grain so that the stripes always remained horizontal. The pattern isn't perfectly suited to stripe matching if you pay heed to the grain lines. But if you take the red wine and caution-to-the-wind approach to stripe matching it works just fine!

So where are we and why so many pictures?

We took a quick trip into the city this morning before kindy to take these photos at the NGV Ian Potter Centre. The foyer has this wonderful installation as part of the Emily Floyd exhibition.

And then the perfect payoff for a well behaved model is the exhibition and kid's installation upstairs....

In one room is a huge pile of white plastic letters. Kind of like a literary sandpit!

Either she's going by an alias or couldn't be bothered finding the right letter!

Then to continue the theme the next room has a Small Press where you can create your own Manifesto with that near-extinct beast, the typewriter

And some quirky stamps... "Solve your personal problems socially"

Finally, when you've had as much as you can take of your mum taking photos, you can go into the members lounge for a biscuit! Awesome!!

We had a delightful morning out together and she's terribly proud that now that she's turned 4 she has to pay for the train ride. Big steps!

This turned out to be a very successful dress modification and one that I can see myself making over and over again. The tutorial for the front placket is over on the Oliver + S blog. My next post for them is also inspired by a trip to the gallery. It's a bit of a nuts idea, here's hoping it turns out cool, not just weird....