Sewing Vogue Pattern V2004: Cutting Out Pieces & Thoughts on Cutting Them Out of Bed Sheets

Hi everyone! Over a year ago, I planned on publishing more posts about my sewing progress creating Vogue Patterns’ V2004. I got sidetracked while writing the posts, so I ended up leaving them as drafts. Over a year later, I decided to finish writing the posts.

In that time, I decided to scrap my old version of the dress and make a new one. I really didn’t like the way it fit in the chest, so I decided to remake it. I cut out all the pieces… and that’s as far as I’ve gotten in making it. Even though the posts I worked are for the first version of the dress, they are about the pattern and my opinions about it.

For this post, I want to talk about cutting pieces of the dress out and what I think about using bed sheets as the fashion fabric.

For this post, I wanted to us the midriff pieces…

and the collar pieces…

(I want to mention I debated if I should show off what the pattern pieces look like. Clearly I decided to use the photographs showing the pattern pieces, but I wonder if I should keep doing this for future posts.)

Cutting the pieces out went as normal. The only difference is I needed to enlarge the midriff to fit me. The main focus of this post is my opinion on using bed sheets to make the dress.

To be honest, I felt really nervous about using bed sheets for the dress. Even though bed sheets are just large pieces of fabric, I still felt slightly embarrassed to use them. When I was growing up, in my family using bed sheets were looked down on. It is a sign of cost cutting measures and that the person making the clothing is very poor. I knew people who wore clothes made from bed sheets, but women in my immediate family saw this was a sign of a lack of financial wealth.

To be honest, I don’t know why my relatives were so snooty. The people that wore clothes made out of bed sheets were really nice. Also, I always thought they looked really nicely dressed. (I always thought their clothes were better than mine) Yet, I have many female relatives that have really snooty attitudes about clothing and other things. They were also extremely opinionated and vocal about them. As an introvert and my family didn’t have large sums of money, it was hard to get along with them.

While working on the first version of the dress, I ended up slipping into the same old mind set I had when I was a girl and teenager. I always hated being around them because of their attitudes. If they found out I made a dress using fabric from bed sheets, no matter what company those sheets are from or how nice they are, I would never hear the end of it. I debated if I should even publish posts about this sewing project because of my fear of my relatives.

Over a year has passed since I started working on this dress and I can honestly say the years I’ve spent trying to stay away from those relatives have been very successful. (It also helps that some of them have passed away) So, I didn’t hear any complaints about using bed sheets to make clothing. (Yay!) I also doubt they know I have blogs, which means they don’t read anything on here anyway. (Another yay!)

To be honest, I have no problem wearing clothing made from sheets, no do I have a problem with anyone else doing so. It is quite logical to use sheets to create things that need large amounts of fabric on a budget. Yet, I have found using bed sheets can be harder to use due to their shedding of loose threads. Still, it is an option for budget conscious sewers that I too enjoy using. Especially if the sheets are made out of a high thread count or a special design unavailable in conventional fabric versions.

 

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!