Goldfish dress.

There are times when I spend hours looking at museum sites and peoples’ blogs just too look at all the pretty dresses. I love seeing what others have created and getting inspiration from them. I find myself saving pictures especially from the museum websites. And sometimes I even get the bright idea that I want something like that too. This dress is one of those I saw somewhere, saved and decided I wanted.

I don’t know where I saved it from and doing a google image search yielded no results. I do believe it came from a museum site though. I wish I had labeled where it came from but of course I did not. I did however take the time while saving it to put 1960’s in the description so that gives me an idea of what era this dress was inspired or really copied from. Since I would say I just about copied it.

To get the goldfish design, I did some figuring of about how big it needed to be then zoomed in the picture on my computer and traced it onto paper; Yep a nice and old school way of doing things tracing them on paper with a pencil. I find this is one of the easiest ways to do this. I put the brightness up all the way on my screen, lay a piece of paper on it and trace the lines. I have done this with other things before and it works great.

It took tracing it twice, because I wasn’t quite sure how big I needed it to be and should have measured better the first time. I then laid it on the cut out piece of fabric with transfer paper and traced it with a tracing wheel so the design was directly on the fabric.

I started out with the fish, I had thought about just painting the fish directly on the dress but the idea I might mess up freaked me out to badly so went with piecing them out of fabric which worked wonderfully. The orange part of the fish is cotton that I used fabric paint on to keep the edges from fraying. The black part of the fish is a knit that I also used fabric pant on to keep the edges from curling. I did just a thin line with a paint brush along the edges just to keep everything nice and by matching the paint to the fabric it’s hardly noticeable. I prefer this method to fray check which I think makes fabric look greasy, or folding under the edges because that makes it bulky looking or simply doesn’t work because of all the angles.

Once the fishies where prepped I zigzagged them on to the front piece of the dress, then came the hard part, Appliqueing the black lines.
For this I used an embroidery hoop, my embroidery foot, (on my Bernina this is foot#6) and embroidery floss. The embroidery hoop I used is not for a machine, it’s for hand needle work. I figured it would work to keep my knit fabric taut, it did a good job. Knit has this way of bunching up when sewn, especially when using a zigzag stitch. And yes I had to keep undoing and redoing it as I moved through the design, but it sure was easier than doing it without the hoop
The embroidery foot is something I have little experience with and have never attempted to use for appliqueing but it seemed easy enough and I had used the foot to do a crazy hem with fishing line once, and I have done applique like this without the foot so I did have some idea what I was doing.

The foot though was nice because it kept the floss in the center and I didn’t have to try keeping it there manually like I did when I did this with yarn. The embroidery floss is thin enough to thread through the little hole in the foot where the yarn was not. I know that this is not exactly what this foot is intended for but it sure works well for this. It took a little bit for me to get the hang of what I was doing. I did manage to tangle the floss pretty badly at the beginning and had to remove the foot to pick out stitching that was tangled all around it, leaving me to wonder just exactly what I had gotten myself into. Yet I was determined to go on. After picking out I set the thing aside for a few days and when I went back to it, it went easy peazy. It still took a while, a few hours I guess. But I figured out how to not tangle it anymore so that made it seem easy. The secret \is always keep the floss that is being fed through in front to the front of the foot and held taut making sure not turn it too much or too fast.
Once I had the fish on the rest of the dress went fairly quickly.

For the dress I used simplicity pattern # 8415 view c with a few alterations. The dress I was copying had a dropped waist and I wanted to keep that aspect so I dropped the waist and shortened the ruffle. I also simplified the pattern by making it out of knit so I could pull it over my head. I cut the back piece on a fold eliminating the zipper completely. I also redid the collar making a simple bias strip like on a t-shirt.

When I came across the dress in my saved folder I realized I had knit in the right color in my stash and without adding a zipper I didn’t have to buy anything. The original dress looks to be made out of linen but knit is so much easier to care for, plus I had it. I am trying to come up with things to make without going shopping. And while I do have a lot of ideas of what I want to make including some I have all the things I need. A lot of it is impractical though, and I have nowhere to wear it. I thought this little dress would be cute with leggings and can be worn anywhere even if it’s just being stuck at the house. It’s cute it’s comfy and I love it. I hope it washes well because I want to wear it all the time.