Our customer Elizabeth Michelle who is a regular customer at Britex Fabrics seems to always be on the lookout for vibrant colors and amazing prints at our brick-and-mortar store. She always gives us a shout out on her Instagram page when she creates something cute or fun from our fabric. Recently, she found a lipstick print that she transformed into a fabulous garment.

Hello! I'm Jenny and I blog at Jenny Homemaker.  I'm so excited to join the team of talented Britex Fabrics guest bloggers and share my first project with you! Apparently, I decided to go all out for my first garment, but how could I not after spying Britex's beautiful selection of rayon blend satins?!  This "summer sky" in particular caught my eye immediately, as I'd sketched this dress (Simplicity 1873) in a similar color last year.  By the way, in case you’re curious if it really is as vibrant as the website shows, it is!  I've worked with a lot of light silks recently, but I had volume in mind for this particular dress, and this rayon/cotton satin gives that a bit of a head start.  For a party dress like this, I recommend starting with a fabric with a somewhat stiffer hand than your average satins.  This will give the pleats a great shape. Then, there are a few things you can do for even more "oomph".  Side note: you can use these tricks on softer fabrics as well, just be careful to choose the right weights for your fabric. The first trick for volume, is to underline your satin with petticoat net.  This will add a bit of that petticoat shape, without having to wear an extra garment.  A huge plus for those of us who have hot summers. To underline your satin, cut the net using the same pattern pieces as for your outer fabric.  Then, cut your outer fabric, marking all stitching lines (including pleats, darts, etc) and the fold line for your hem.  Pin the net layer to the wrong side of the satin and hand-baste the two layers together using cotton or silk thread, right along all of the traced lines.  Then, construct the garment as you normally would.  Bonus: if you like to hand-stitch your seam allowances in place, you can do so, stitching them only to the net and you don't have to worry about any stitches showing on the outside.

Today our customer Joan Burgren stopped by wearing an awesome dress that she created with some of our gorgeous cotton fabric. Joan lives locally in Menlo Park and has been sewing for three years. She drafts her own patterns, including the pattern for the dress she is wearing here. She sews for herself, for fun.

If you will be in the L.A. area now through August 14th. Be sure to check out the amazing costumes and set models from the Starz tv series Outlander at The Paley Center. The show is free and features the amazing dress created by Terry Dresbach. Terry created this dress with fabric from Britex Fabrics. Read more about the dress here.

The show runs Wednesdays - Sundays 12:00pm - 5:00pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays
465 North Beverly Drive
Beverly Hills, CA.

Admission is FREE and open to the public.

 

  Summertime in San Francisco can be fickle, but this year has had more beautiful days than not!     Using a Designer Italian stretch cotton, I made Simplicity 8085, a 50s wrap dress which is perfect for running around the City on a sunny day. The fabric has these amazing watercolor swatches on a faux-linen background and the hand is nice and crisp for a midweight cotton. Because of the weave, it doesn’t unravel very easily, which makes this an excellent quick project.     For this dress I used just shy of 3 yards on 60” wide fabric, which is a little bit on the low end for a vintage design with a full skirt (luckily my short stature helps with the skirt length!) Most dresses of this style can push 4 ½” yards, so this is a nice compromise if you’re looking for a vintage-style piece without using too much fabric.  

On Friday, we had a visit from one of our customers who was wearing a dress she had made from one of our brightly colored cotton fabrics.
Emma has been sewing all of her own clothes since she was 15 (she is now 18). She taught herself to make dresses by obsessively re-reading vintage 1950s sewing books that she found at thrift stores. Her taste for her own dresses is very specific, she tends to heavily favor vintage-esque silhouettes in bright colors with geometric designs, and she loves African wax-print cottons. The only sewing/clothes design that she has done for someone other than herself, is when she costumed a science fiction play at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Emma has countless illustrations that she has made of her own outfits and designs for her theater costume work.

For her day job, Emma is a cartoonist. When she isn't creating fabulous clothing, she has an online comic, she has drawn strips for Dark Horse publishing, and has taught cartooning classes for kids at 826 Valencia, a writing center in the Mission, in San Francisco. To see more of Emma's work please visit her website.

For more about our cotton fabrics, please visit the cotton section of our website, or the second floor of our store at 146 Geary Street in San Francisco.

 

With winter approaching and temperatures dropping, I wanted to create a wool dress to keep warm for the season as an alternative to just wearing sweaters. For this project, I selected an aubergine wool blend with embroidered scallops. I cut the dress on the cross grain and found this fabric fairly easy to work with. The only challenge was lining up the scallops at the side seams, which took a bit of patience. The double rows of scallops were about an inch apart.

When I saw the thick, bold charcoal and oatmeal colored stripes on this textured linen blend, I immediately thought of playing with contrasting stripes and creating a strong, structured silhouette for a high-fashion fall look. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to update an existing pattern and share some helpful design and patternmaking tips along the way.

Hi, I'm Britex Guest Blogger Kristin from skirt as top, and today I'm back to share a dress I made using Britex's Smoke & Coffee Stretch Cotton, which I reeeally loved working with. This dress is actually a remix of my favorite dress pattern, Made by Rae's Washi Dress, and though as I sewed it I was calling it "Frankenwashi," I came up with a prettier moniker now that it's all done.  Named after one of our favorite coffee shops and alluding to the rich and complex color of the fabric---I'm calling it the Ristretto Dress!

My favorite sewing challenge is to take a proven, great-fitting, well-written pattern and modify it into something new.  I do it when I sew for my kids all the time, but haven't ventured into doing it for myself too often yet.