A Miz Mozelle toile

Firstly, please forgive the awfulness of these photos - they were taken in really poor light, but I wanted to share them with you anyway, as they show the toile that I made for the Miz Mozelle dress, before cutting into the lovely Liberty fabric. Try to ignore the unfinished hem and the fact that the belt is just a strip of torn fabric!

You might remember that in that post I talked about a couple of fitting issues and you can see here why I made the keyhole smaller at the neck. For these photos, I had cunningly angled the dress so that my bra was not on display, but you'll have to believe me that there are indecency issues with the toile.

Making toiles can feel like an unaffordable luxury: even cheap fabric is expensive and for this I needed to try it out in a stretch fabric, which tends to be doubly difficult to find inexpensively. However, I was lucky enough to find some beautiful quality stretch fabric in my local sewing shop, that they'd been disturbed to find left your hands looking a little inky on handling. They were selling it off for £2.50 a metre, so I bought nearly all they had and washed it along with half a pound of salt once home to seal the colour. It's now perfectly colour-fast and was very much worth buying.

Despite this version of the dress being an unwearable experiment I do love the way it looks in a plain stretch fabric and plan to make a wearable version at some point soon. While my last dress was labelled a 'summer wedding dress', this next one will hopefully be an 'ice-creams and swing-parks dress'. I did say that I may end up with several Miz Mozelle's in my wardrobe....

Best of all, this type of dress works with my favourite shoes, which I'm completely loopy about. My sister and I spotted them at the airport when we flew out to Russia, but as I said a few posts ago, I rarely make impulse purchases. I'm so pleased I didn't in this case, as they leapt onto my feet in the Radley sale for half the price. They also came in shocking pink, which could have been fun.

And yes, our lawn is mostly clover and daisies, rather than grass. Obviously it's intentional and we planned it that way. It's part of an open-ended ecological experiment...

We are off to our first wedding of the summer this weekend. You might notice from these photos that my legs are an attractive shade of milky white: I must remember to unleash my bottle of tan on them. Earlier in the summer I did just that and then wandered off downstairs and joined my husband in a shot or two of the vodka that I had brought back from Russia with me in May. By the time I came back upstairs, having caught sight of my legs in a mirror, I wondered whether they were ever going to turn brown and so decided on applying another layer of tan for good measure and happily daubed another layer in the vague direction of my legs. When I woke the next morning I was met by the sight of black ankles and knees and strange streaks decorating my shins. Through process of elimation I found that pumice stones and loofahs do nothing to remove fake tan (but only after I'd removed most of the skin on my ankles). What does work is Simple eye-makeup remover pads...the branding would imply some purity to the ingredients, but I now believe them to be saturated with something akin to paint striper. The moral of this story is don't drink and tan (note to self). What do you have planned this weekend?

Florence x