Spring Styles Unveiled at Expo!

We had a GREAT time at the Sewing and Stitchery Expo in Puyallup, Washington last month. If you missed it, I can highly recommend this show to everyone who loves garment sewing. Yes, there are classes and vendors for quilting, but the split is fairly equal. Every year, Vogue Fabrics, (available online at http://www.voguefabricsstore.com/) comes to the show with rolls and rolls of beautiful fine fabrics at fantastic prices. It was all I could do to keep from taking it all home myself!

As a new vendor, everyone was so very welcoming. It is customary for all to wear ones own designs, and I was no different. Since there were only 4 days, there wasn't time to wear them all! I had to pick carefully. At the show I unveiled 2 new styles, Tia and Beatrice. The day I wore Beatrice, EVERYONE said I looked like Jackie O., that, or they mentioned Madmen. I've never seen that show, so one customer pulled up a photo of one of this actresses on her phone to show me what they were talking about:

Wow. To say I look like that is stretching it just a little...but I did receive plenty of compliments from everyone, and even the men-- however few there were. A fellow vendor at the end of my isle stopped me on the third day to say that he had noticed me every day, and that he wanted to tell me in the kindest way, how nice I looked. WHO wouldn't like that?? Now you want to know what is this dress that makes everyone think of a voluptuous Madmen actress in pink?

Please, let me introduce you to the Beatrice Pocket Dress. I love a dress with pockets, but these aren't ordinary pockets, they are interior kangaroo pockets. We've made our dress out of satin and lace, but this simple dress with upscale details could be made of just about any fabric.  

I didn't wear Tia, but I didn't need to. She got all the attention she needed at the Expo. This was also the debut style for the Saturday ASG fashion show. Everyone asked me about the fabric, but I couldn't be very helpful I got the fabric out of  my Aunts stash. It had been lingering there, unused, for far too long and she was ready to give it up. The minute I saw it, I knew it had to be a fun, full, flirty spring dress. Though we cannot get that fabric anymore, this style with a great contrast trim would look great in just about any kind of light to medium weight printed fabric. Perfect for your stash fabric too!

I am so excited about this last style because I have wanted to make it into a sewing pattern for a very long time now! I did this design several years ago for a competition, where it won a cash prize of $1000.  Now I know that's not like winning project runway or something, but that money helped in the start up of what would become my pattern line. Do you agree this dress is the very essence of stylishness? If you don't have an up coming event to wear this dress, I recommend you get your calendar right now and invent one!

Head on over to the shopping page where you can read the descriptions, see all the photos, and yes...I hope you'll take one or all of these new spring styles home with you today!

http://www.sewchicpatterns.com/shop.html