Designin’ December is a sewing challenge organised by Linda from Lányos Handmade. It’s in its eighth year and I have participated in all of them. The aim is to take a designer garment and recreate it, for obviously a lot less than the original is worth. My own twist on the challenge is that I buy nothing new – everything has to come from stash. In October I found a designer skirt for which I had an identical pattern that fitted perfectly and I had the perfect fabric. So I smugly sat back and thought I’d make it in early December. In late November I got out the fabric and the pattern and found to my horror that I didn’t have enough fabric. I tried a few more pieces of fabric but nothing was working for me. So I was back to the drawing board. I then found a denim dress and thought I could recreate that but then lost interest, so Plan C was formed. It’s a Prada dress that costs $3,600 and looked really simple (spoiler alert: it wasn’t!).

The original is wool but it’s summer here so an enormous continental cotton pillow case was dragged out of a box and I was pleased to see that I had already unpicked it, so that saved a few minutes. I also needed some lining and found some silk that I felt would do the job. I gave it a gelatine bath to stop it sliding too much as it’s pretty thin.

I then began playing with patterns. I had nothing really similar and started with the Fibremood Zita as I felt I could make the neckline match, but it had far too much fabric in the body. This is my second toile where I had removed even more fabric from the body. I also had a serious problem with my left shoulder strap. I fiddled around with it, and would get it right and then find another problem.

I hacked the pattern quite a bit and made toile number 3 – this is so unlike me! I couldn’t resolve all the issues so thought I’d find another pattern to hack and in the end went for my TNT pattern, the Pattern Union Cora Blouse.

To be honest it doesn’t look like the Prada dress at all, but it gave me a starting point. I played around with the neckline, lowered the bust darts (why are they so high?) and did a sway back adjustment to get rid of the puddling in the back. Interestingly I have none of these issues when I make the original pattern, so not sure what’s going on here. This is toile number 4.

I could not face a fifth toile so decided I would make this work and set about cutting out my pillowcase.

My next task was designing the gusseted pocket and I used Liz Haywood’s excellent tutorial in her book “The Dressmaker’s Companion”. The resulting pattern piece looks like this:

The Prada pocket is made from knitted wool, so I chose to replicate it with some ponte, which I hoped would give the same feeling. It was hard to judge the size and as soon as I had made mine i realised that it was a bit big. I considered unpicking it, but decided that it could all go horribly wrong if I did! It will be able to hold a lot of useful stuff though…

The shape of the dress is A-line and there is a belt on the back which gives no shaping but is a nice detail.

Some other details include the label. Sorry it’s out of focus – I had to zoom in. My label is loosely inspired by the Prada one, but my label is De Nada, Perth! Although de nada usually means “you’re welcome”, the literal meaning is “It’s nothing”, which I thought was appropriate for a dress which cost me nothing, and it also rhymes with Prada, which I like. I made the whole label on the Cricut.

So it’s time to show the dress in its entirety. I have to say that I really enjoyed wearing the dress, its simple design was a pleasure to wear.

I included the bottom right photo as the young woman in the background came and apologised for walking into my photo, which was clearly not her fault or even an issue. We had a lovely conversation and she admired my dress – I was so chuffed. I didn’t tell her that I had made it, not sure why. The dress is a bit short but I was limited by the amount of fabric in that pillow case; I even had to add a strip of fabric on the front hem, which is very visible in some of the photos, although less obvious in real life. I used hemming lace to create a neat effect.

I found the perfect buttons in my stash: gold with a twisted rope effect.

All that’s left is to wear this dress at every opportunity. It can be styled up or down depending on the shoes and accessories and feels wonderful with the silk against my skin. I also want to thank Linda and the many fabulous sponsors of this competition. If you don’t know about it, do check it out.

I thought you might like this video of Miss G after her Hairy McLary dog fell off her lap when she was on the swing. She immediately went into nurture mode, which I love.