Easter Emery Dress

Hello hello! How are you all this evening? Suitably relaxed and chocolate-filled after a long Easter weekend I hope! I used the bank holiday on Friday to put the finishing touches to the latest in my long line of Emery dresses, which I'm here to share with you today.

I'll warn you now, this won't be a groundbreaking post - there's nothing new to say about sewing what is undoubtedly my most tried-and-tested pattern, but this is probably my favourite version to date so I wanted to share it anyway.

Apart from the fact that it fits me really nicely, and is exactly the kind of silhouette that I like, one of my favourite things about the Emery dress is that it's a perfect simple canvas for showing off gorgeous prints, which meant that it was the obvious choice for this beautiful floral number.

You know those times when you see a fabric and just HAVE to have it? This was one of those occasions! The print is Plockade from the Sommer collection by Sarah Jane for Michael Miller. I picked it up from The Village Haberdashery, who sadly don't seem to have this colourway in stock as I write this, but they do have lots of the rest of the collection available. I instantly loved this print, and knew it would make a really pretty dress so I treated myself to a couple of metres.

I did briefly consider trying a new pattern, but when such a lovely fabric was involved I thought it was better to go with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it principle" and stick with an Emery. I also decided that being as the print features daffodils, the dress needed to be finished while the daffodils were still in bloom, so it skipped to the top of my (admittedly fairly loosely defined) sewing list. You may notice that particularly brilliant fabrics have a habit of doing that with me - and I make no apologies for that!

As it's a good quality cotton, it's no surprise that this fabric was a pleasure to work with. It's got a really nice feel to it as well, with a better drape than lots of quilting cottons. That's not to say that it drapes brilliantly, but it has got a softer hand than other quilting cottons I've used. It works perfectly for a dress like the Emery and feels lovely to wear.

In case you haven't guessed already, I really love this dress. It combines my favourite pattern, a gorgeous print and lots of pretty colours so really it was always destined to be a winner, wasn't it? Have any great fabrics "forced" themselves into your shopping basket recently?