Two Afternoon Tea Tops (and a dress)

Having found the pattern for the Afternoon Tea Top on BurdaStyle, I have gone overboard and made a couple (and I plan on making more).

Here's the first two:

I'm going to enter the first one into the Spring Top week vote as I'm really pleased with the way it turned out.

I then realised that it would be fairly easy to modify the pattern into a dress. In order to do this I laid out all the pattern pieces as normal, with the exception of the main front and back bodice parts. These pieces I laid out with an existing skirt pattern I had lying around (the skirt from the Sew U book). I then drew around this smoothing out where there was any overlap, and I extended the dart from the bodice to go down to where the dart on the skirt finishes. Once I'd put it all together, the dress had quite a 50s effect, so to fit in with this, I made the straps into halter ties.

Here's the finished dress: The first time I wore it out, I was complimented on it and asked where they could buy one from, so I'm pretty happy with that!

Floral bag, twirly skirt

I have finally managed to finish off and photograph a couple of projects which I started quite a while ago.

The first one is a bag which I made from a tutorial on the Heart of Mary blog.
I'm quite pleased with the way it has turned out, but for myself I'd like a longer strap and different fabric. Due to this, I think I'll be listing it on my etsy site.

The next is a skirt that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that I've done entirely from my own design. I based it on a skirt that I bought from Primark a while ago by just creating 8 identical panels, sewing them together and then creating a band to go around the top. I then hemmed it and put a zip in between 2 of the panels. It was kind of an experiment but I'm really pleased with the way it turned out and shall definitely make another at some point....and an action shot: