Capsule Collection: Pattern Cutting and Construction

This weekend was a rather busy and productive one. Half of my collection has been sewn up, hooray! After moving all the furniture out of my way in the living room to create my pattern cutting 'floor-table' I started working on the printed garments: 

 

First of all, I was pleased to find that I had enough length of fabric to create the dress I wanted instead of having to change it into a top. However, this added length meant that I didn't have enough fabric left over for sleeves - doh!  So I decided a sleeveless dress was the way forward. 
This capsule collection for Cagecity is based on my graduate work which featured fitted, printed garments. For the capsule collection, however, I decided to create a slightly oversized, boxier silhouette as the pieces are one-off garments to be sold online, meaning that customers haven't got the chance to try it on first. With a loose fitting silhouette, my collection will be more versatile, suiting a wider range of body-types and hopefully more potential customers! So, I opted for a slightly A-line shift dress:

The neoprene fabric was straightforward to sew but the jersey lining did give me a slight headache whilst I tried to figure out how to deal with it on a domestic machine... Sewing jersey when you don't have a machine specifically set up for it can be very difficult indeed! A great way to solve this problem is to use zig zag stitches instead of the straight stitch - this prevents the jersey from puckering up. Once I was past that hurdle, everything was smooth sailing and my dress was complete:

I'm not going to stop there though as I think this dress could do with some surface interest. During my graduate collection I experimented with using bright embroidery on top of my prints to add some interest and more layers to the artwork. I really liked the effect but unfortunately I didn't get the chance to use this on my garments due to lack of time. I plan on finally using this for my Cagecity collection. Here is a sample of the idea: 

Dress finished, I moved onto the top. For this I used the same pattern as the dress to get a uniform silhouette within the collection. All I needed to do was add a sleeve pattern and decrease the length of the pattern pieces and voila! complete.

Pretty sure I've inhaled a lot of neoprene fibres during the process and I am covered in threads but I guess that's the look I'm going to be pulling off this week as I make the rest of my collection... stay tuned.