A Stitching Odyssey: Watch This Lace - Anna's beautiful bird dress

Friends, we're halfway through Watch This Lace already, can you believe it!?! Firstly, a quick confession: I'm pretty sure I want to be today's participant! Anna from paunnet is a cool Italian (so much cooler than being Cypriot), she fully utilises the stunning Italian countryside in her equally stunning photos, she has gorgeous mermaid hair and I would quite literally swap wardrobes with her in a heartbeat. In fact, I'm having to try very hard to keep the green-eyed monster at a bay after today's offering...

Hello, everyone! I'm very happy to be a guest of the lovely Marie today! When she contacted me asking if I wanted some vintage lace to make anything I wanted, I was so excited! I'm all about girly and feminine clothes, so lace fits perfectly in my aesthetics.

I'm so used to being inspired either by a pattern or fabric, however, I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to make using this lace as a starting point. It was a change in my creative process and I actually enjoyed the challenge. My first idea was actually a dress with a bodice VERY similar to Winnie's gorgeous Librarian blouse. For the sake of variety in this blog series, luckily I changed my mind and started thinking about a lace collar. If you are a reader of my blog, you might know I am slightly obsessed with collars. But since a lace collar might be too twee even for me, I decided to go with a half fake collar, made with two lines of lace.

When the idea was clear in my head, I went looking for patterns and I used the bodice of the Burdastyle Sewing Handbook Dress, which I altered by eliminating the front keyhole and making a small one at the back, doing an FBA and adding 1.5cm to the length. And since I wanted a gathered skirt, I went with one from my most trusted patterns, Deer and Doe's Sureau dress.

Finally, I totally lucked out with fabric, when I found this silk blend with a bird and floral print on sale. It was just perfect in terms of colour, print and weight. The dress came together very quickly and as a final touch, I added some lace to the bottom of the skirt.

I'm extremely happy with the final result, it's something I see myself wearing a lot as soon as the temperatures will go up a bit. About that...I apologise if I look a bit rigid in these photos, but it was just about to snow (we now have almost a meter of it) and I was freezing!

I don't know about you, but I'm head over heels with Anna's dress - I think it would slot into my wardrobe just perfectly *hint*!

Next Sunday, I'm excited to be featuring another much loved sewing blogger - Handmade Jane! To see who's already taken part and who else is coming up, hop on over here.