I suppose that this is the post in which I awkwardly introduce myself and bare my hopes and goals for this blog, but at this point, I won’t. Instead, I’m just going to jump right in and tell you only that this is where I will divulge the interesting results of my experiments in making my life a beautiful, creatively satisfying endeavor. And here is an example of such.

When my old roommate moved out, she neglected to properly forward her mail, meaning that her magazines landed in my greedy hands, including her August issue of Lucky, which is where I came upon a row of lovely Duro Olowu kimono dress knock-offs.

Admiring them on the page, I thought no more about the dresses until I was at my favorite craft supply source, SCRAP, and dug up a large piece of material that I immediately knew would make a fabulous version of this type of dress. Rather than going out and trying to buy a pattern that I didn’t think would match my vision, I figured that I could just adapt a free kimono pattern from the internets. When I googled “kimono dress,” though, I came across the very inspirational blog Hook & Needles (from which I borrowed the photo of the Lucky article that she used here), and lo and behold, it turns out that I’m not original in my desire to make a dress of this style. There are, in fact, at least two commercial patterns available, McCall’s 5137 and Simplicity 4072 (Erica B. has actually made them both!), but I decided that I wanted neither of these and would make my own pattern.

And so I did. I broke out my huge roll of industrial pattern paper, purchased from what I suspect was a former sweatshop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, my measuring tape, and a ruler, and got to work. But I didn’t use the fabric that originally inspired this undertaking; I instead made a practice dress out of a bolt of several yards of striped cotton I’d bought from a neighbor’s stoop sale for $5. “A practice dress?” my boyfriend asked after I explained the mess I was making in the middle of the living room, “That seems like a lot of work….” As I told him, however, the advantage is that I won’t waste my irreplaceable fabric on my screw-ups, and I’ll hopefully end up with a pattern that I can use over and over. It took me a couple of days of stops-and-starts, but I finished the muslin version of my dress.

What surprised me most about this dress is that the fabric choice really makes the pattern’s influences obvious. It reminds me very much of its humbler origins, the yukata, a casual Japanese summer cotton kimono.

There are a few changes that I will make in the final version. The 7″ side zipper, for example, is too short, which makes getting the dress on and off a bit difficult, but it was the only invisible dress zipper I had at the time. I’ve already bought a longer one for my “real” dress. The waist portion also doesn’t fit tightly enough, but I think that this problem will be solved in the final version by using a stretch fabric and making it a bit more snug. I’ll also probably flare the skirt a teensy bit more and give it a bit more ease. The collar also doesn’t sit quite right in the back, hopefully a problem that will be solved by using a less stiff, drapier fabric.

After I finished my rough-draft, I found out that the kimono dress is actually all the rage right now, at least with A Dress a Day. Isn’t her latest gorgeous? I hope mine tuns out that well!

Now it just remains to turn this:

into a dress. The black-with-flowers is from SCRAP, while the off-white is a stretch satin I picked up at Discount Fabrics on Haight. Wish me luck!