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!

Tesco Sheet = Lovely New Dress

Having made a dress from this great tutorial over on craftster, i decided to make a similar dress by modifying it a bit. I took the basis for making the bottom and doing the measurements for the top, and made the top so that it had straps over the shoulders.

As it was my first attempt at drawing up my own pattern, things were bound to go wrong...and they did. I completely forgot about seam allowance and ended up with a tiny bodice. In order to fix this, I have added in panels at the back (I luckily noticed before I'd fitted the zip). These panels actually add to the effect of the top, so I'm pretty pleased it worked out that way.

Here's a picture of it on a hanger:


And one of me wearing it to get the effect of the bodice:
As the material came from a duvet cover, there's absolutely loads of it left. At present I'm making up a skirt out of some of the remainder (again from my own design, so who knows how it will turn out). I'll post up pictures once it's done.