WEARLEMONADE #16 CHIARA DRESS DIY[:]

Hello my darlings! Thanks again for your kind words on the new collection, I’ll say it again, I have an amazing team and I’m proud of us! This launch is so exciting, I feel like we’re finally able to offer you the fashion and the lemonade experience that we’ve had in mind since the beginning, there still are a lot of things to improve but I think we’re getting there, little by little!It’s a wonderful feeling when you achieve your dreams! Nothing must be forgotten, and we’re already thinking about our next move, but it’s good to have such encouraging feedback! To tell you the truth, it hasn’t always been easy to expand our little business, we’re still a little start­up just at the beginning of our journey and we’re often lacking the means to achieve all our plans. Right now, difficult choices must be made in order to produce the quality we’d like to offer you.

Along with the launch of the e­shop and the new collection, it’s time to reflect on the Wear Lemonade adventure. It also is an opportunity to go over our goals and the direction that we’d like to take. After thinking it over long and hard, we’ve decided to give up the PDF sewing patterns and focus on the paper booklets in order to give you the best sewing experience possible. We’ve gone back over the packaging, made it more solid, created a tabso that you won’t loose your new tags anymore, called upon a great team: studio ravages, to rework the maquette, and to top it all off, the graphic designers that worked with us are unequalled seamstressesand they pointed us in the right direction to make the booklet the most clear and practical possible. On the agenda: slice plane on a width measuring 1m10 by 1m40as well as a glossaryas well as a shopping list! Plus, for our clients overseas, the patterns will be bilingual; this is another investment for us.

Since the beginning, our philosophy has been: make sewing a moment of true happiness, and despite our efforts to improve the PDF patterns, each day dozens of clients tell us about their problems printing the files and lining up the pages of patterns, which completely goes against our theory of enjoying sewing. Besides that, the downloadable patterns ended up being costly, financially and timewise, that can no longer be handled by the low price of the PDF patterns, even more now that we are translating the patterns in English. So, rather than raising the price of the PDF significantly again, we’ve chosen to invest in the quality of our paper patterns, and Laure and I are committed to developing a new, free line of exclusive PDF patterns for blog readers, very regularly.

What you should know about the beautiful Chiara dress :

• to make it you’ll need 2,20 m of fabric if it has a width of 1m45 or 3,50m (for a width of 1m10)
• as well as the same quantity for the lining
• 1 invisible 50 cm zipper (you can cut it if you wish, don’t forget to burn the end after cutting).
• 1 small staple, or a ball buttons and a strap

Laure suggests using whatever material you wish for the Chiara, but avoid knits! Go wild with cotton poplin, satin, taffeta or organza, or even light gabardine for a Mad Men look, or in lace or English embroidery (oh yessss...).