Breatfeeding Dress DIY

Hello everyone! 

I’m here! I’ve made it back to the blog! Spud has fallen asleep on the sofa, and did not wake up when I moved away from her! It’s a miracle of epic proportions.

Life is very different here, I seem to be feeding almost constantly, did anyone else realise babies feed basically constantly?! I tend to do this lying down, I think I mentioned on instagram recently, this is mostly as I am lazy but also because it seems that Spud feeds better that way. Plus there is always the chance I can creep away from her if she's nodded off and quickly fill the dishwasher, start tea or put a wash on. These are my main life goals at the moment and I’m pretty happy with that. Mr T gave me some time to myself for the first time on Saturday and it was pretty brilliant, I made my adapted Coco pattern in 2 ½ hours! I surprised even myself.

I have decided to start something called #speedysew. This is my programme of sanity building whereby I'll work on my sewing in five minute dashes. This will necessarily mean leaving things out on the sides, but if I get five minutes in which to do anything, sew a single seam, or cut out one pattern piece I will still keep moving forward with my sewing, and watching my fabric pile whilst feeding won’t be quite so painful.

Today I'm going to show you my solution to the breastfeeding issue... how do I get at my boobs? I'm still figuring this out, it's difficult to find things that cover skin but give access to your boob. But when I went to Mamas and Papas to get a car seat for Spud, I found a super amazing black and white dress which had overlapping layers, and a top that folds down over it. Difficult to explain but take my word for it, it's the best. Inspired by this, I've made the following dress!

I decided to take some jersey tops that I no longer wear, and create some dresses with boob access. This is the first of this batch, the hem fabric is a piece that I bought in Abakhan when I used to work there, that's quite a while to stash some fabric! I never knew what to do with it, but having plain black fabric and piecing this together into a border print has made a beautiful fabric in itself. 

In order to do this yourself, I have taken some step by step photos for you. I (again) used the Washi pattern to identify the length of the top half. Apologies that the black doesn't really show up the cut lines that well.

This is the length that I cut it to, it should fall just under your chest.

Trying on the top, I pinned where the cuts will have to go, so that they fall right over your nipple

I then cut these as in the photo below, and then overlapped the two cut layers.

Stitch with a zig zag stitch two inches up from the bottom, and two inchess of the overlap from the top. 

I hope that makes some sense, here is a flash of bra to give you a better idea. Don't say I never treat ya.

I flipping love this dress, it's so comfortable and I feel really glam in it! I'm not having any excuses to be so glam at the mo... plus I look kind of tired in these photos... and my hair is all sorts of mess. 

But I kind of like that. I look how I feel, a bit tired, and not caring about my hair. I have other things going on! I want to be honest in this blog, I don't want people to think I'm breezing through this motherhood thing. I'm having a good time, but it's a tiring watching four hundred episodes of Stargate with a baby attached to you kind of good time.

In that vein, it has taken me three goes at writing this blog post, but I've done it! Niiiiiice. No promises about when I'll be back, but I hope it's soon.