Toile Eyelet Dress

Back in 2005 I joined Wendy Schoen's Embroider Club, which I've mentioned several times on this blog. The first item I worked was the Toile Eyelet Dress, but I didn't buy the kit for it. I decided I would be "original" and buy my own fabrics and make my own version of the dress. So off I went to Sew Special, now out of business, (the owner retired) in Vista, California and bought a lovely toile fabric. It had an ecru ground, and all I had was white linen for the yoke. So I dyed the yoke in coffee with a bit of vinegar, and lo and behold, it came out a perfect shade of ecru. Now the linen matched the DMC shade of ecru perfectly!

This embroidery on this dress was challenging, but that is the whole point of the Embroidery Club, to learn new techniques. It had not only round eyelets, but teardrop shaped ones as well.

The teardrop eyelets were the leaves on the stems, and the little bluebirds were worked in blue floche. Round eyelets are fairly easy, once you do a few hundred or so, but the teardrop eyelets are a bit more harder to work. You have to mark the outline with a very sharp pencil, work a running stitch over it, then another running stitch to fill the gaps. Then cut the fabric inside the outline in an asymmetric cross, fold the fabric to the back, and stitch the eyelet, trying like the dickens to keep it symmetrical. At the last, trim the bits of fabric, which are now worn to a few frazzled threads, from the back of the embroidery.

And here are my somewhat asymmetric eyelets. Now don't get me wrong, the instructions were very detailed and easy to follow, in theory. They were just very difficult to get worked correctly.

I used a purchased piping I found that matched the peach color of the fabric perfectly.  But I found these adorable butterfly buttons that I just had to use. This was a Big Mistake, they are a real pain to button and they distort the shape of the buttonhole something fierce. My advice - use round buttons, they are so much easier to use when drying to dress a wriggling toddler.

This was my first and last time buying the fabric on my own for Wendy's Embroidery Club. It didn't take too much time, but I decided that buying the kits was much easier and faster, and from then on in that's what I did. I only ever finished one other garment that year, and if my daughter ever finds it, I will post a blog about that one.