Hello Everyone!

Its been a while! I hope you have had a great summer. I've been very lucky in having two holidays this summer. The first to Florida with one branch of the family and the second to Lanzarote with another branch of the family. What with holidays, hosting the Minerva Crafts Meet Up event back in June and launching our new website you can imagine I haven't had much time for blogging these past weeks.

Talking of our new and improved website, you may have noticed that the Minerva Crafts Blog (that you are reading now) has been designed now as a place for myself and my daughter Vicki to blog about our personal sewing projects, plus 101 other things to do with Minerva Crafts and the crafting world in general. And of course we fully intend to blog each month again for the Minerva Crafts Blogger Network - our projects have been sorely lacking recently - must do better!

Part of the plan with the new-look for the blog is for Vicki and I to blog more often about our personal crafting projects - so we will be writing this blog together, with both of us contributing posts that we hope you will enjoy reading. We have some very special sewing coming up soon with Vicki getting married next year. Between us we are making Vicki's wedding dress, 5 bridesmaid dresses, my outfit as mother of the bride and various other things for the big day. So keep tuned on the blog for this!

Since we last spoke we now have our very own sewing/craft room at work! We absolutely love it! We are so lucky to do the job that we do. Having this room at work will allow us to bring you more projects to inspire you to get sewing, knitting and crafting. In the job we do we are constantly surrounded by products, people and ideas that inspire us. We hope to share some of that with you and hopefully inspire you too. We will show you a little guided tour of our new craft room in a future blog post - promise!

Another section to the newly-designed Minerva Crafts Blog is a category for ''. Now this only came about recently when the lovely girls at By Hand London got in touch and asked if either Vicki or myself would like to be pattern testers for their new PDF pattern 'The Sabrina Dress'. Well, I jumped at the chance! I havent used a BH pattern before. We've stocked them for a while now here at Minerva and I've been itching to give them a go ever since they landed. I know Vicki has too - in fact shes already got herself a copy of the Anna pattern.

Anyway, back to the Sabrina. It is a simple styled dress with princess seams. There are two variations. The first is a button up style with rouleau straps. I imagine this as a super sundress in a soft cotton fabric or linen. 

The second is a high neck, sleeveless dress with a centre back zipper. The possibilities with this pattern are endless. It could be your new 'little black dress' or it could be worked in a sumptuous sequin fabric, made longer and you would have a beautiful evening gown. Then with a little bit of alteration to the front and back piece you could make the button up front sundress into a zip up back sundress and the high neck zipped dress into a button or zip up front - so many options!

Here's the line drawings for the two styles;

I have chosen to make the high neck zip up back dress to start with. I have gone for this lovely ponte roma jersey fabric in plain black for the side panels and a black and grey floral patterned ponte roma for the front and back panels.

Like I said I haven't used a BHL pattern before so was very pleased to see their instructions are really very easy to follow. This was my time using a PDF download pattern too. I must say I do definitely prefer the speed of paper sewing patterns as opposed to PDF's, but it wouldn't stop me using one again if a PDF was my only option. I like the little comments they add on the BH patterns such as when joining the princess seams they state, "The curves of the dress front are trickier to ease, so take your time and use plenty of pins!" - so helpful for beginner-sewers.

Here are a few photos of the making process;

I particularly like the way they have described how to make the rouleau straps, although I havent made this style (yet!) I still read all the instructions when pattern testing.

On fitting my dress I realised I didn't actually need a zip as the pattern suggests because the fabric is stretchy enough to be able to get the dress on without one.

The only difference I made in cutting out the dress was to make it one inch (25mm) longer, I wanted the length to be on my knee, not above it. And so I did my usual stretch stitch hem. As I've mentioned in other posts in the past, I stitch the hem and then trim right up to the stitching and the hardest part of this is that it could be so easy to snip into the dress fabric.

I decided on using Applique Scissors this time which have quite funny-looking blades. 

They are described as a Duck Bill blade which keeps the lower layer of fabric away from the upper to allow close cutting in applique work. Why haven't I used these scissors before for my hems? They are amazing! I felt quite comfortable cutting very close along my hem and the result was brilliant.

Hope you like the finished dress. I wore it to go for a meal for my birthday. We had a lovely night and I think you always feel good when you're wearing a dress you've made.

Until next time,

Annette x