Girls Sewing Patterns

In line with Girls’ Dresses month, I will be talking about some fabrics used for making girls’ dresses. Have you noticed that in most of the Japanese sewing/pattern books for girls, they tend to use rather muted colors, plain solid color fabrics or simple prints like geometrics and florals. When I first started buying fabrics, I used to get attracted to these cute characters and girly features like strawberries and ribbon bows. But these are hardly seen in books. Character and cute prints are usually used in magazines like Cucito where the projects are used to showcase new fabrics for fabric stores.

One commonly seen type of fabric in many of the books and patterns, is the double gauze fabric. I have never seen this fabric in Singapore other than the shops that import Japanese fabric, and even then the selection is very very limited. In Japan this fabric is very common and it comes in all kinds of prints and colors.

Japanese word of the day – ダブル(da-bu-ru) ガーゼ (ga-ze). Directly translated from the word “double gauze”, it is sometimes labelled as W-ガーゼ on fabric labels, I guess “W” is a short cut way of saying ダブル. 🙂 Double gauze is exactly what it is, two layers of gauze. Gauze alone is too sheer and too thin to have considerable “body”, but two layers is just right, and oh so soft! The draping of the fabric is a little like linen, where it has some “body” but while linen takes many washes to soften up, double gauze is already soft. It does have a little bit of a crinkly look after washing though, you can iron it but it is not easy to get all the crinkles out.

Here are some double gauze fabrics I found on the internet. Click on the images to see the source and other color options.

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