Rainbow Mesa

Right after the Indie Month contests were announced, I started hacking up some patterns.  My first, that I happened to get to wear to Seattle Pride, was a Seamwork Mesa that I hacked into a rainbow.  The second still needs a touch more work, but will hopefully get blogged about before the deadline.

I started out with a sketch of what I wanted.

I decided to use the Seamwork Mesa for my starting pattern.  I’ve made it twice before and I knew it fit pretty well.  I did go down a size from my previous ones and I think it’s even a better fit now.  I compared the front and the back of the dress pattern and decided that they were close enough in size/shape that I’d be ok just making two fronts and sewing them together, which made this hack much easier.  So first I printed out the dress front piece twice and taped them together to make a full piece.

You can see above that I sketched in the lines for the rainbow pieces.  I did a combination of eyeballing and measuring to get them to roughly appear even.  I then colored in the stripes to help keep which piece goes with which color fabric once I started cutting out the pieces.

I then cut each piece apart and added seam allowances.  I even added actual notches like a good seamstress!  As you may have noticed in the photo above, I messed up my rainbow coloring.  Luckily, I figured it out while I was still adding the seam allowances and fixed the colors with some permanent markers over my colored pencil.

The fabrics I used all happen to be in my ginormous stash.  I have a bunch of nylon/lycra active wear fabrics that I pick up on sale from Fabric Mart and Fashion Fabrics Club whenever I can so that I am able to make a ballroom gown on a moment’s notice, if I were to so choose to do so.

Since I made the decision to just make two front pieces and sew them together, I was able to just cut a double layer of each color.

I then just sewed each half of the main dress together and cut one red and one yellow sleeve and sewed it all together.  I would have liked to split the sleeve into yellow and green like in my sketch, but I was doing this the day before I needed to wear the dress, so I got a little lazy.

And the back is just a mirrored image of the front.

I am quite proud of this dress and plan to wear it again next year.  A few additional photos of me in my dress at Seattle Pride can be found on my blog.