My beautiful dress

I know Mum has already written a post about my lacy dress, but I thought I should do one from my point of view.

Every winter my fire brigade has a formal Annual Dinner, always a fun night at which we recap the year that was and awards are presented etc. Me being me, I flatly refuse to wear the same outfit two years in a row-I KNOW no one but me will remember, but that's not the point. Besides, there's photos! Anyway, the past two years I've gone floor-length black numbers (one of which was a one shouldered skintight wowzer that Dad said I looked like a "1940's movie star" in, last years was a Zara dress that fitted so perfectly in the shop and made me look so tiny I couldn't leave it behind), so this year I decided to go a) colourful and b) short. I drew up a few designs of what I'd like, decided that it'd be too hard to find fabric and lace for and went shopping instead. In Bardot, I found almost the exact dress I wanted...except it didn't fit my boobs - no surprise there - and was far too expensive for my poor uni-student budget (just as a sidebar, I also found a super cute dress that I think will have to be Mum's next project). So I took photos in the mirror and showed Mum. This apparently cleared up a lot of questions about my designs...apparently I'm a worse artist than I thought. Whoops. Anyway, the day of the dinner I came home to find It waiting for me, calling my name and begging me to wear It. And wear It I did, with pride, feeling like the luckiest girl ever to have a Mum who can create such pretties just for me. All night I had to keep looking at it, and when I was standing up I kept twirling the skirt. 

It is GORGEOUS. A fine tuned, tailored, 'me' version of a dress I found in the shop. I knew it was meant to be when we went to Spotlight and found the perfect fabric AND perfect lace with no hassle. And, even better, it cost nearly half of what the ill-fitting dress in the shop would have cost me.

After many, many fittings of a toile (which is now going to be turned into a summer top, originally I thought the fabric was ugly and so 90's, but Mum has promised to pretty it up) to get the bodess fitting perfectly, a pattern was made by my clever mummy.This is doubly cool, because now we have the pattern for a top that suits and fits my shape. The skirt also proved troublesome, as somehow a size 12 skirt ended up being about a size 6 once the pleats were put in (my waist/bum is size 10, so in theory it should have fitted, in practice was another story). But, again, my clever Mummy fixed it and all worked. 

The main problem we had was fittings. As I'm not home often between uni, work, netball, karate and fire brigade, it was a trick to co-ordinate my flying visits to get clean clothes on between things and Mum's urge to sew. In the end, after the toile was done, Mum just did stuff to what she thought would fit and made me try it on, pinned in any changes then she could alter as she pleased when I wasn't there. She even managed to get the lace top almost just right without me being there (the shoulders need to be taken up about an inch). 

It is the prettiest dress, and I can't WAIT to have an excuse to wear it again! :)

Happy me in my BEAUTIFUL dress.

Miri's Lacy Dress

The Dress (sorry about the horrible photo quality, it was nearly midnight, taken on her phone). 

Having chosen the pattern (Simplicity 4070) and agreed on modifications, off we went to Spotlight, where we were able to buy fabric in comparative harmony.  Miriam chose a cerise faille for the main part of the dress, and black chantilly lace for the top of the bodice.  I had some black taffeta suitable for lining already, so with a  zipper and some thread we paid the princely sum of $34.

First of all I washed the fabric.

I made a toile of the bodice so I could get that fitted correctly, which only took about 15 fittings, unpicking, unpinning, summoning – “Miriam, don’t go too far away, you have to be here when I want you!” (That’s often an issue – she wants fitted dresses but isn’t around for them to be fitted at the time I want to sew).  When I was happy with the fit of the toile I unpicked it and recut the pattern pieces using the adjusted toile as a guide.  Two points:

• It’s better to make something too big than too small – you can always take it in, recutting is a much bigger job and wasteful.
• The purpose of a toile is just to get the fit right, so it usually isn’t made in fabric anybody would want to wear.  However, I hate to waste the effort so if possible, I also make it up into a garment.  In this case, I used some cotton from my scrap bag, which I thought was quite a pretty floral but Miri just said “Yuck, its pastelly and so ‘90’s!”  Well, she’s wrong – its ‘’80’s, and I think I can change her mind, - I have a design for a summer top in my head.

The back of the dress (photo was taken by her very tall boyfriend, hence the angle...)

I interfaced the bodice lining with a soft iron on woven fabric, not Vilene which is sometimes too stiff.  I just wanted a bit of body, although in retrospect I perhaps should have put boning in the bodice.  I was depending on the interfacing, the close fit and the lace upper bodice to hold the bodice up wrinkle-free.  A last minute fitting availability problem arose and the lacey bit turned out to be a little big – OK, but not tight enough to support the bodice properly (or cover the bits of bra best not seen).  Fixing it will be easy, I just have to take it up at the shoulders and redo the neck and armhole edges, which are only overlocked.  The other challenge was getting correct placement of the lace scalloping, which was harder than I thought.  I used another pattern for the neckline, I wanted something rounder – although the picture on the front of  Simplicity 4070 shows a round neck, the pattern neckline is actually shallower and wider than I wanted.

I mistakenly assumed that the skirt would fit OK.  I cut it size 14 on the principle of it’s easier to take things in, but in fact even size 14 was too small, and Miri is usually size 10-12ish in the hips.  The pattern is supposed to have lovely big, loose pleats but when I pinned them, the waist would have fitted a 10 year old, so I had to gather instead.  I could have recut the skirt (using the existing pieces) lower down which would have made the piece shorter and wider but I was running out of time and patience.  The lining, which was a skirt without pleats was also a bit tight.  Anyway, I’ve put a note in the pattern envelope so that if I make that dress again, I’ll be reminded that I need to allow extra width for the skirt.

I guess it’s easy to focus on flaws, but I was disappointed that she had to wear it with the bodice not 100%, and I do think the pleats would have looked nicer.  Otherwise it was a good result – I didn’t even have that much trouble getting the invisible zip in, I only had to unpick it about twice! (Not my best thing).