Hello Internet Friends!
Today I have a special treat of a make! My lovely Painted Circles Pensée Dress by Deer and Doe! If you’ve been following my Instagram you’ll have seen this dress on my lovely dress form, Zadie, way back in May. I had hopped for some good weather to finally wear it out but alas, due to a Vancouver ‘June-uary’ (when it’s June but it really feels like January because it’s so rainy) and a general covid lack of social events I never got a chance/excuse to wear it until recently.
I got the Pensée pattern a while ago, and had gotten it printed up on a plotter, but just didn’t have the right fabric/inspo to make this dress a reality. So the pattern sat a while rolled up in a corner of my sewing room until this fabric appeared from BlackBird Fabrics. I looooovee this fabric, it’s a very drape-y viscose that feels oh so silky smooth and the print on it is just fantastic, I love how the circles aren’t uniform and kind of have a ‘water colour bleed’ effect. I’m kind of sad that I only managed to snag 2 meters, which was just enough to make this dress, but not enough to squeeze out another project. I think it would look equally good as a nice wrap top or maybe something with petal or flutter sleeves.
Once the pattern/fabric inspo hit I actually made up this dress really quickly! I think from cutting to sewing took just one weekend! In retrospect I probably should have made a muslin of at least the bodice, I’ll get to some minor fit issue in a bit, but due to running out of my usual muslin fabric from Ikea and not being able to get more due to the pandemic at the time I decide to just wing it.
Since my hips/booty are a bit bigger than the size that my bust needed I cut a size 40 for the bodice, tapering to a 42 at the hips. I also shortened the pattern (#shortgirlproblems) by 2” which I semi guesstimated based upon the height the pattern is drafted for and holding up the pattern pieces to myself and deciding how much I wanted to cut off. I typically would have made the dress a little shorter, maybe by another 1-1.5” but since since there’s a lot of skin going on up top I decided to go for a knee grazing length. Since I hadn’t made a muslin I did check the fit of the dress after sewing the darts, side seams, and basting on the straps. At the time I thought the fit looked pretty good other than shortening the straps a bit to bring the front up a tad. I really should have checked the back of the dress more closely since the back is a bit more drape-y than I had imagined. Looking at the #ddpensee tag on Instagram it appears that some people have intentionally styled their dresses this way, and by no means does it look bad, I had just envisioned the back being a tad less drape-y, so I think I’ll go back in and shorten the strap length where it meets the back to raise it a bit.
For future top or dress version I also think I’ll do a petite adjustment on the V neck as there’s a bit of gaping which lead me to use some double sided tape just to feel a bit more secure while wearing this dress out. This amount of gaping wouldn’t have been a problem on a normal dress (just kind of annoying) but since you can’t wear this dress with a regular bra (and I haven’t gotten around to sewing myself a strapless bra) really it was more a nip-slip concern!
I really like how this dress turned out! it’s perfect for the summer weather that has finally hit Vancouver (no sweaty bra to worry about!). It works great as a ‘summer meet up at the park picnic dress’ and as a ‘drinks on a socially distant patio dress’ (again 2020, what can i say?) I can also see myself wearing this dress into the fall with either a nice blanket scarf, cardigan, or blazer, the latter two meaning that I can wear a regular bra with it without it showing.
If Vancouver Frocktails could have been a thing this year (dam you pandemic!) this is the dress I probably would have worn, it’s very ‘cocktail' dress’ like but can also work in different scenarios as I mentioned above. Did you guys make anything semi-fancy this year hoping to wear out to an event or just for sewing fun? Let me know in the comments!