Would you believe I took these photos back in January? And somehow it looks more springy that it does out the window in March!
This dress is classic, 100% pure Gillian. Multicolour floral! Border print! Comino Cap TNT pattern! Combine it with this Concord hack cardigan and the Espresso leggings I’m wearing underneath, and this is quintessential me.
As you might guess from the million-and-one poses where I’m holding a coffee cup, the theme of this year’s Day and Night Dress Challenge, hosted by Elizabeth Made This, was “Coffee and Cocktails” – a dress to wear out with friends for coffee, and something more chic to wear out at night! This day dress came together in a moment of inspiraed sewing the day Elizabeth invited me to participate… but as you’ll hear when I post about it on Monday, the cocktail dress took a lot more thought!
I regularly wear at least ten versions of the Comino Cap dress by Kitschy Koo, which you can see listed in my TNT tab in the header. I love it so much that last year I reprinted it and graded it up a size so that I could keep the ease I like! I made this one with 1.5m of a border print ITY end. This is the perfect simple pattern for letting the print do all the hard work to make the dress look special!
I took these pictures in a little park near a busy intersection, and it took quite a lot of experimenting to find the good light. I thought you might be interested in seeing the effect of photographing in different directions in essentially the same 10m area!
- far left: part shade, part direct sunlight. I really struggle to take good pictures in direct light – I find the shadows are harsh on my face, and distracting on the clothing!
- full shade, with sunny areas behind me. This is the sort of reliable lighting in most of my pictures. I’m in the shadow of a house, but the effect is the same when I’m on my shady porch or leafy street!
- 180 turn from the last shot, with the house behind me. In this photo, I’m basically in the shade by my camera is in full light as the sun sets behind the rooftop. There is a hint of nice lensflare, and the blacks are softer! I love how these pictures look, but I find this soft lighting hard to track down.
- 5 minutes later, as the sun sinks behind the houses behind me. Nice soft, even light – I’m always impatient and try to start taking pictures before golden hour, but if I’d started at this point instead of 20 minutes earlier, it probably would have been easier!
Moral of my rambling story: Experiment, because the same location can offer lots of options!
Speaking of location… that house behind me is where I was a nanny through my last year of university in 2004! I was living then on the same street I live on now. You never know where you’ll end up!
Fun Fact #1: That coffee cost $7, which is the same price per metre as the dress fabric! All the more reason to brew coffee at home and spend on fabric instead!
Fun Fact #2: As I walked to get the coffee, I was answering a work email and crashed face-first into lumber sticking out of the back end of a pickup truck! I literally did not see it coming, and just stood there in shock after it happened! My glasses were all bent (but not broken) and luckily they saved me from the worst of the impact. I went home and cleaned off the bloody scratch near my nose, put on my other pair of glasses, and went back out to take these pictures! Lesson learned: Look where you walk!
I’ll be back on Monday with the details of my night dress – and I promise there will more mention of actual sewing in that post!
Crafting A Rainbow 
Cute outfit, and it’s amazing the difference turning this way or other can make, I should really try that myself sometime, so that I can rely less on my dressform. But it’s so much easier to take pictures of a dressform after situating the garment “just so”. 😛
Guess that’s one reason to keep glasses over getting Lasik or wearing contacts. Glad you are OK, but this is exactly why I say that people can’t text/mess with their phone and drive–though I feel like I’m the only one who thinks this. I even have to nag *my parents* about it! Sorry…major pet peeve of mine.
LikeLike
Come to 🇨🇦! There’s a fine of several hundred dollars of you so much as touch your phone in the car! One of the reasons I got a new car last year was so I’d have Bluetooth calling, and be able to safely dial and answer the phone without touching my actual phone!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fabulous border print! Our deputy director was checking an email on her phone and tripped down the stairs at work ;o)
LikeLike
Oh my gosh, that must have been painful! I”ll remember that I’m tempted to check my phone as I go down stairs!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Love it, and I really appreciate the extra information on pictures and lighting! I am very clumsy and have walked into several things myself…not always because of a phone distraction, haha! Glad you weren’t hurt!!
LikeLike
Such a fabulous outfit! I’m with you on walking into things with alarming frequency 🙂
LikeLike
Love this dress! And the photos look great, glad you didn’t seriously hurt yourself.
I have been admiring so many of your knit dresses as I like that the top isn’t as fitted as most of the patterns I find for knit dresses but that the waist also doesn’t appear to be gathered, which seems to be the other option to get a less fitted knit dress.
I was wondering how you do it? I have read a few posts where you refer to putting elastic at the waist but I can’t get my head around how you get the ease in the top without it looking like a gathered waist/skirt. I have a similar pattern but the bodice is fitted and I am trying to work out how I can get a similar look. I don’t fit in the Camino Cap measurements so trying to get a similar look with a different pattern.
LikeLike