Get your pinny on

Does a photo ever stick in your mind and you just can't stop thinking about it? Well, that's how I felt when I saw Nette's "Autumn love" pinafore dress a few months ago. I knew I had to recreate it. Luckily, she has kindly made it into a free, downloadable pattern so it was fairly easy to do!

I don't know why I wanted (in fact, felt I needed) a pinny. Or that, just like Nette's, it had to be corduroy. I suppose I was just drawn to it in some way - I think it reminded me of a red cord pinafore dress that I had when I was very little. I really wanted to copy her gorgeous blue colour but I've made a few things in navy recently and recreating my red pinny may have not got as much wear so I thought so decided to go for black instead. Yes, a bit boring, I know!

No you can't do any work, I want a cuddle NOW

The pattern is really straight forward. Actually the most complicated thing was to figure out if Nette's measurements were similar enough to mine to make the same size...(picture lots of head scratching here)... Without doing any complicated maths, I reckoned adding 3cm around each piece but using a seam allowance of 1.5cm would do the trick - and did, just about. We are about the same bust size but I'm a bit bigger at the hips so I should really have graded the pattern a bit more accurately and not added any extra at the bust as it's a bit looser than I'd like here. Ho hum, who cares? It still looks quite cute.

Close up of the slightly wonky bodice

I love corduroy by the way! First time ever I've worked with it and it's brilliant. What I didn't like tho is that I had to spend ages hoovering up all the bits that fell off after cutting!

The only thing I changed about the construction of the pinny is the way the bodice lining is attached. Nette's instructions said to catch stitch and blind stitch and all sorts of other stuff - could I be bothered? Um, NO! I used the attachment of the bodice to hide the fact that I hadn't got the front and back pieces completely lined up...

Basically I just machine stitched it in place after folding over the bottom edge and now you can't see that the bodice pieces don't quite line up unless you look really closely while squinting. WIN!

Oh and I ran out of the lovely lining material so I used an almost matching plain blue for the patch pocket lining.

It took me only an afternoon to make this and it was lots of fun. I will now have to wear it with ponytails to make it look authentic... Thanks Nette!