A Dress Full of Peaches (Simplicity 9105)

 More orange! Or, more accurately, peach. Lots of peaches in fact.

This dress is full of them!

Back in 2020, when I bought the fabric for my blueberry dress, I also bought a few yards of peach covered fabric. I’ve long loved peaches (actually I love just about any fruit, more on that this fall), so clearly I needed a peach dress.

It’s been quite a hit! Every time I’ve worn it out and about I’ve received compliments on it. The toddler I nanny loves it. So, I would say my assessment of needing a peach dress was correct.

I paired the peaches with Simplicity 9105, a 1950’s vintage reprint pattern. I believe I picked this pattern up at a sale around the same time I bought the fabric.

As marvelous as the peaches are, I thought the dress needed something to break them up, so I decided to use the shot linen, leftover from this skirt, for the collar and belt.

As, by the time I got around to making this dress last summer, I’d already used these linen scraps to trim my paisley Thanksgiving dress the year before, it was slim pickings. Quite a bit of piecing was required to make my plan happen.

On the plus side - I already had the belt done, since the same belt could be worn with both dresses!

I used the “detachable collar” piece from the pattern as my template for piecing together the linen collar, and I sewed the pieced together linen directly to my bodice facing, made out of the same fabric as the rest of the dress. Nothing detachable about this collar!

As with a lot of vintage style dresses, this dress features buttons down the bodice, but also has a side seam zipper. I contemplated eliminating the side seam zipper and figuring out a way to make it all front opening, the way I did with my thanksgiving dress and my lavender African print dress, but as this pattern didn’t feature a center front skirt seam, my brain didn’t feel like tackling that project. (I could have done something like a dog-leg closure, if my brain had felt like cooperating that day, but I had Covid at the time, so that wasn’t happening.)

Thus, the side seam zipper stayed.

Other than my permanent, rather than detachable, collar, my only other change to the pattern was added slanted pockets to the side front panels of the skirt. Slanted pockets are easier than inseam pockets when you’ve got a side seam zipper to deal with, and because of the aforementioned Covid, I was all about easy!

The dress was finished with dark green buttons down the front of the bodice, so it was all ready to wear once I recovered and could leave the house again!

Honestly, as annoying as being sick was, those 10 days I was home last summer allowed me to finish all sorts of projects! My coral necklace, the fiery orange dress, the Gryffindor dress, and even my 1830’s dress and pelerine were worked on that week. There are advantages to not being able to leave the house.

There was one other dress I finished that week, but here a year and some months later, I still don’t have pictures of it, so sharing that dress will have to wait! 

Meanwhile, I’ve got some more recent, and a few older, projects that have been photographed to share. Maybe we can even move on from the color orange now!

Maybe.