Hello, Fibre Mood Emilia Dress, lovely to meet you in all your colour-dipped autumnal glory…

When I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to make up one pattern from issue 7 of Fibre Mood before the magazine’s release,* I jumped at the chance.

I already have a fully paid-up Fibre Mood subscription, so I could have just waited for my magazine to arrive, but I’m loving Fibre Mood’s designs so much at the moment, that, well, I couldn’t resist the chance for a sneak peek of what issue 7 would contain!

I chose to sew up the Fibre Mood Emilia dress for my sneak peak.

Fibre Mood Emilia is a midi-length shirt dress, with ‘real’ shirt features: a proper button placket, sleeve placket and cuffs and a yoke. It’s quite oversized, using gathering at the back yoke and front shoulders to create volume and flow. Its piece de resistance is a pussy bow collar.

It can either be worn loose and oversized or a combination of ties and elastic can be used to cinch it in for more definition at the waist.

Ummmm, so, where do I begin here?

Well, how about with “I think I love this dress”?

Fabric Choices

The gathers and oversized styling of Fibre Mood Emilia obviously lends itself particularly well to lightweight drapey fabrics: think rayon/viscose, silk, crepe, tencel etc. I sewed mine out of the amazing viscose linen noil from Blackbird Fabrics.

I can’t gush enough about how much I adore this fabric. Easy to work with. Drapey. Breathable. Beautifully textured. More substantial than most of the viscose or viscose blends I usually encounter…

I’ve already sewn a couple of garments with other colours of the same fabric: Pietra pants and my navy Burda Style trousers.

The only practical warning I would offer is that, after being pre-washed, my fabric was about 130 cm wide. At this width, there were a couple of the pattern pieces for the Fibre Mood Emilia which only just fit on my fabric. So if you don’t want to have to create jigsaw pattern pieces, I wouldn’t try to sew this pattern with fabric that’s any narrower.

Preparing the Fibre Mood Emilia

If you’re not familiar with Fibre Mood, it’s a magazine which is taking the sewing world by storm – well at least my sewing world!

Fibre Mood magazine (issued once every two months) includes full sized patterns that you trace off, adding the necessary seam allowances. The magazine includes abbreviated diagrammatic instructions for every single pattern in it! How awesome is that!! Unlike some sewing magazines which include detailed instructions for only a few patterns, I find it really refreshing how every single pattern in a Fibre Mood magazine seems accessible instruction-wise.

Let’s face it, when I buy sewing magazines, it’s for the patterns and instructions, nothing us. I like the way Fibre Mood concentrates just on the important stuff!

Plus online you can also download (for free) more detailed versions of the instructions for every pattern, which include written instructions and even more detailed diagrams.

You can also purchase patterns found in the magazine online individually, which can be printed in either PDF or AO format.

This Fibre Mood Emilia was the first time I used the printable version of a Fibre Mood pattern, since the magazine wasn’t yet available. I have to confess that the downloadable version of the pattern wasn’t my favourite.

Due to time constraints, I sent the pattern straight off for copyshop A0 printing. The printable versions of the pattern are layered, however, which is one of my pet peeves. This means you still have to trace everything and can’t cut directly from your printed pattern.

You also still need to add in the seam allowances.

The long and short of it is that it annoys me to pay for printing when I then still have to do a lot of fiddly work in tracing and adding seam allowances and I end up feeling like despite have paid for the ‘fast’ solution I had to spend a lot of time on prep work.

So for me, getting the magazines and tracing from it is definitely the best way. Still time consuming, but it’s far more cost effective!

My Fibre Mood Emilia

Based on the size charts, I went with a size 42 for my Fibre Mood Emilia. The instructions indicate that, for this pattern, when between sizes, you are best to rely on your bust measurement for size selection. This is what I did, even though my waist and hip measurements would have placed me in a larger size.

This sizing advice was spot on, given the amount of ease around the hips and waist, and I wouldn’t change anything size wise.

Fibre Mood provide a pretty comprehensive list of finished garment measurements which makes it easy to make informed choices about the size that will best suit you. I noticed that the upper arm measurement seemed like it could be a bit tight for me.

After all the aforementioned tracing and adding seam allowances, however, I was feeling too exhausted to do a full bicep adjustment. Instead, I took the very lazy approach of cutting a sleeve a few sizes bigger and then I gathered the sleeve cap to allow me to set it.

Of course I’m not advocating such laziness, but it was all I was capable of at the time and I’m happy with my final sleeves!

I’m fully aware, of course, that it was probably a pretty silly short cut since a proper full bicep adjustment would probably have taken about the same amount of time as sewing the basting stitches to gather the sleeve cap.

But, oh well, I’m sure we all have those moments in sewing where we just feel like “no, I cannot do that right now”. (Yes, I know that feeling is probably a good sign that I should stop sewing for the day, but I never listen to better self in this regard)

Hot tip #1

If this is one word of advice I would offer to anyone sewing the Fibre Mood Emilia – this is it!

Take a look at the layout page of the instructions. Honestly, if there is one page of any set of sewing instructions that I always skip, it’s the layout page.

I always feel that it’s only a guide based on one specific size and width of fabric which are unlikely to be mine. In my mind, I can figure all that out best myself.

However, on this layout page of the instructions for the Fibre Mood Emilia dress, was also a key explaining a couple of (to me) unusual markings on the pattern pieces. The markings indicated that you are supposed to mark some tailors tacks onto your pattern pieces. These marks will be very important when sewing your collar later on!

I didn’t look at this page and, when I saw the strange markings on my pattern pieces, rather than try to figure out what they meant, my instinct was to say “oh, don’t know what that means, I’ll just ignore it”.

Sewing pyschology

I gotta say, the process of sewing this Fibre Mood Emilia dress really made me laugh at myself. Since I hadn’t marked the crucial tailor’s tacks, I got myself really confused while attaching the collar and collar facing. This was entirely my fault and it would have been easy if I had properly marked the pieces.

I almost attached the collar facing to the collar in the wrong direction. Upon being about to do so, I saw that the notches didn’t match up. My immediate thought was “my notches must be wrong”.

Not “I must be making a mistake” but “my notches must be wrong”.

Cuz that makes sense!

That mind set, combined with my “I don’t know what this mark means so I will simply ignore it” from above, left me laughing wryly at the state of humanity.

I mean, I consider myself a pretty critically thinking kind of individual. Yet, my psychological instinct when faced with even a very minor issue was to simply dismiss anything which might suggest that what I was going to was not correct.

Frickin’ human nature.

I always wonder in dismay how that orange-hued buffoon across the Atlantic can hold the fate of democracy in his hands, but when even my own instinct is to dismiss anything which might cause me a minor inconvenience, it’s easier to understand how our own psychology and tendency to self-justify has left humanity as a whole standing on the edge of the abyss.

Ahhh from sewing instructions to the end of humanity…

My rants truly know no limits…

My modifications

Apart from causing myself some confusion around the collar due to my totally self-induced lack of markings, the only other place I was a bit confused was the method for creating the placket on the sleeve.

I couldn’t quite understand what the diagrams were asking me to do.

I was also confused by the fact that the binding piece for the sleeeve placket is called a ‘bias sleeve placket’ but the grainline marked on the piece itself is not on the bias. So I was a bit bamboozled as to whether this piece was supposed to be cut on the bias or not.

To be honest, the same confusion at this point caused me to skip this step entirely when I was making my Holly Dress. But, since Fibre Mood Emilia is a proper shirt dress, I really wanted to ensure a proper cuffed sleeve,

So I knew I had to find a way to work through my bamboozlement.

In the meantime, I wanted a pocket of some form in my Fibe Mood Emilia, so decided to use the breast pocket from my Kalle Shirt pattern by Closet Case patterns. As I was finding the breast pocket piece piece, the sleeve placket piece from the Kalle Shirt fell out onto the floor.

Serendipity!

I decided to simply use the Kalle shirt placket, which uses a more traditional sleeve placket method that I’m quite familiar with and call it a day.

So, I’m probably totally hyping up the confusion, but this is how I managed to avoid having to figure out my “what????” moment…

Waist-ed

The only other place where I didn’t follow the instructions is the method for cinching in the waist. The Fibre Mood Emilia uses an elastic channel, which connects to tie ribbons which are tied in front. I was worried that the ties at the front would detract from the pussy bow around the collar so I decided to skip them.

So my chosen method was to just do an internal elastic channel without any ties.

In all honesty, I think it’s not the most flattering aspect of this dress. I should have come to know by now that elastic is not usually my friend. For a next version, I think I will skip the elastic channel and make a simple tie belt and wear it with the tie at the back.

This will avoid my “two ties are too many” problem at the front and will also create more flexibility in being able to wear the Fibre Mood Emilia both cinched in and oversized.

Fibre Mood Issue 7

So with my Fibre Mood Emilia done, I’m happily now swishing around in a fountain of mustard!

(Hmmm, now I’m thinking of hot dogs…)

If you want to see what other’s have been making from issue 7, you can check out Fibre Mood’s link party for this issue.

I’ve got my eyes on several other potential makes from the issue – the top of which is probably going to be the Fibre Mood Glory blouse in pink velvet. Maybe I’ll even be able to squeeze it in as a Sew Frosting 2019 make this month.

Since velvet is pretty darn frosted after all!

And have you seen the Fibre Mood Carole dress? That dress is everything…

* By way of full disclosure, I received a copy of the Fibre Mood Emilia pattern free of charge from Fibre Mood, without any requirement of a blog post or review. As mentioned above, I’m also a newly minted Fibre Mood addict in my own right and already own a fully paid up subscription!

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.