Thursday 9 December 2010

The Christmas Dress!

Well I have got a bit distracted this week from the projects I've mentioned earlier. I've partly been working on getting presents together-some of which are home made-photos to come. I have also been working on an impulse project-the Christmas dress!

I was inspired by The Sew Weekly's post about making outfits with Christmas fabrics - I immediately wanted one! so I toddled along to the fabric store (which I needed to go to anyway to get a long black zip for the Glee dress) and found a really fun fabric with small red berries all over it-I like that its obviously festive but could also get away with being worn not at Christmas.

The advantage of it being for Christmas and hence novelty, is that I can use it as an experiment to try out all the stuff I'm currently afraid to do! I'm mainly going to be (hopefully) wearing it for cooking 2 meals, so I can always add a cardigan and an apron! Therefore it has a FBA (which I'm not at all sure I got right-I was using the basic method but having consulted my copy of Fit for Real People I should possibly have done it differently-plus it seemed to go wrong around putting the darts back in..)  full neck facings (no dodgy hemming/bad bias here - I think this has worked but as I changed the neckline I'm not even sure if I've got it central any more! the facing looks good though-thanks to Kathleen at Fashion Incubator for a great tute and Tasia at Sewaholic for her understitching guide ) sleeves (ever my nemesis...at least they're short) making a proper muslin (not at all sure this helped) and making something that isn't a skirt for myself and hence needs to be bodge fitted by me straining round in the mirror and trying to explain to my long suffering flatmates what to do! Kudos to the ladies-as far as I can tell they made a pretty good job of it-and in any case I made a complete hash of tracing the muslin (I'd heard it was difficult not to distort the fabric-and that's completely true) that any weird areas are almost certainly my fault.

The dress is a modification of this vintage pattern Woman W420 that I got in a job lot off Ebay. I've put a V neck in as high neck's look awful on me, and done the aforementioned FBA. I also realise looking at it that when I adjusted the skirt I didn't notice there are meant to be darts..so its going to have to be bodged (sigh). I had wondered why it was so big..

It took me a lot longer to cut out than I planned as I hadn't realised that all 3 outfits use the same pieces-even though there are clearly different levels of ease involved. I had to go through and take different amounts off each seam which was slightly nightmarish and I have probably got it very wrong! I'm particularly worried that the sleeves aren't going to set in properly (or at all).

I have made the bodice, the neckline almost looks like a proper dress! I just need to attach the sleeves (shudder) and then work out the back/zip and bodge on the skirt somehow. I am quite concerned that this is going to be a horrible mess.Never mind-perhaps it will be an inspiring success....









(finished dress here)

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