Hello Internet friends!
Long time no speak hmm? Well now that the wedding craziness is over I feel like I get back into the grove of non-wedding related (or at least non our wedding related) crafting! I will be making a post once I get some more wedding pictures about all the DIY fun we did for the wedding (I can say fun now that I look back in hindsight....during it was a bit crazy and we for sure took on a bit too much lol), for now I would like to share one last summer sewing project! This floral Anna Dress by By Hand London that I made for the fluffy blonde monster’s sister’s wedding! (‘Twas the summer of weddings this year!)
To start off with, the fabric for this dress I’ve been hoarding for YEARS! This fabric this all the way back to when blackbird fabrics first opened! I bought around a meter and a half thinking I would make a nice top but then ended up snagging an additional meter during one of their remanant sales (side bar: how crazy are the blackbirds sales? I’ve definitely been on there first thing in the morning when the email comes through and by the time I’ve had a good scroll through all the items half are already gone! insane! just shows you how so many of us sewists are bargain hunters at heart! ). Since that time this fabric has been languishing in my stash waiting for a perfect operunity to shine.
Well that opportunity finally came when I wanted to make a floral wedding guest dress! I’ve recently begun to have a love for maxi length dresses (as you can clearly see by my last post about my Charlie caftan!) and now that I know that I can not only make them in the right length but also save a ton on fabric I now realize what all the hype is about! They are so much fun to ‘swish’ around in and they still manage to keep you pretty cool and comfy in the heat. Plus I feel like they make me feel a smidge taller? Maybe that’s just wishful thinking......but anyway!
It was a bit of a pattern placement puzzle when it came to placing out all the pattern pieces since the pieces for the skirt are quite large but my fabric was already in two pieces. I actually considered cutting the skirt on the cross grain to try and make it all fit but then decided to further reduce the length of the skirt even more than I had anticipated, thinking that if the dress didn’t quite reach the floor when I was wearing heals it would be fine. Turns out that I didn’t need to worry about that as I had under estimated how short I was even with heels on and the final dress is actually a shade too long! I probably should go back and shorten it a tad but #lazy, maybe I’ll get around to it next summer :)
I did have some fitting issues with this dress, mostly with the back of the bodice. As you can see in the above photo (as well as the first photo) there is some pooling of fabric at the top of the center seam. When I made my muslin there was much less pooling but I did take in the shoulder seam to compensate. When I sewed it up in my dress fabric there was A TON of pooling in the back, way more than you see in the photos here. I ended up taking in another 1/2” at each shoulder in addition to unpicking the zipper and taking in around 1” at the top on either size of the zipper and tapering down to the regular seam allowance mid back. The only thing that I can think of that lead to this happening was that the dress fabric is quite drapey and just sat different compared to the cotton I had used for my muslin. I will have to do some further tinkering with the back bodice pieces in the future to figure out how best to cut this bodice without having so many fitting issues.
Due to the alterations I had to make post insertions of the facing and zipper the facing of the bodice did have a habit of rolling out a bit, it wasn’t a huge deal but it was kind of annoying to have to constantly tuck it back under. Again I hope that future iterations of this dress with additional fitting tweaks will fix this. Regardless of these issues I really like this dress! It was fun to wear during the wedding and to dance in afterwards :) The fabric was perfect! I believe it is a viscose blend so it did really well in the heat and kept me fairl cool despite the close to 30C weather.
That’s it for my summer posts for 2018 folks! The summer has zipped by so fast! I can’t wait to share with you some of my new fall knits and fall projects! :D