Tutorials | oliversfancy

I am beyond excited to share this dress with you today. See I’ve been wanting a maxi dress for, like, ever. 😉 Unfortunately due to my height and figure it’s really hard to find one that’s flattering on me. (I have a very wide torso and am basically straight down with no waist definition at all- kinda the opposite of an hourglass) I’ve been thinking it would be fun to try to make my own maxi but couldn’t settle upon the perfect pattern for it. Sometime after making my waterfall tank– pattern by Sew Caroline, I realized that with some tweaks I could make that into a maxi dress pattern. But then I realized I needed some major fabric yardage to make this idea into a reality. Enter my Liberty of London for Target dress that I thrifted over 4 years ago!! (yeah sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things-lolz) I found this dress at a Goodwill (along with a sweet Liberty of London tie for the hubs) and even though it was several sizes too large and had a weird off the shoulder thing going on, I knew I had to have it if just for the fabric. When I brought it home, I attempted some revisions on it, but they didn’t work out and it’s sat in my mending bin ever since.

I’m glad I waited to use the dress because it was perfect for this pattern. First off, I took the tank pattern and added about 25 inches to it- starting with the size M on top and angling out several inches to a nice A-line shape at the bottom. Then I took my dress and carefully

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I was so good at accomplishing my weekend to-do list! Got both sewing-related items checked off so now I have a finished quilt top to show you, finally!

Part 2 of the tutorial:

Gather all your blocks together.
Iron all the written-on blocks to set the ink into the fabric
Lay out on design wall or floor to decide on preferred layout. I interspersed the signed squares with blank squares and left a large block in the middle for the monogrammed portion of the quilt
Sew the squares into rows and then the rows to each other.
Part 3 of the tutorial (finishing steps) here

This quilt is queen size and boy is it huge! I didn’t quite realize how big queen-size would be when I set out to make it. I LOVE the way it turned out…exactly how I had pictured in my head. Good news is that my sis-in-law loves it too! My only concern now is how I am going to quilt it! I wanted to do some straight line quilting, but I am not quite sure how I will fit that humongous quilt under my machine?! Guess I will just jump in, give it a whirl, and see how it goes. However, I kinda doubt I will start on the quilting this week so I won’t quite worry about it yet. My goal this week (regarding this quilt) is to get it basted and all ready for quilting- meaning it’s time to find some fabric for the backing.

It was hard to take good pictures of this quilt because of its size. I needed a big ladder to stand on so I could get a straight-on shot but I only had a chair so you have to see it from a bit of an angle. Maybe I can tape it to the side of the house to get a full-on shot for later. It’s about 75/25 percent between the signed and unsigned blocks. The large, white, center square will be hand-quilted with the initials of the bride and groom as well as the wedding date. Part 1 of this tutorial can be found here.