The Party Dress That Was Not

I threw myself into my next dress project pretty quickly after my February dress was complete.  I wasn’t planning on it being March’s dress, but it could be if I wanna stop sewing for the month.  I have a wedding party to attend in a about a week, well much less than a week away now, and I had big plans to make my own dress.  I wanted something fancy made with material that wasn’t gonna cost too much.  (I am not that confident in my sewing abilities to spend top dollar for my material just yet.  I am still shopping the clearance material racks.)  I was kind of surprised when I found something that I thought would make for a nice dress and it was all very reasonable.

It didn’t take me long to make it, only two days of working on it a few hours each.  It is another one from this pattern that I used for December’s Dress.  It seemed as if everything was moving along nicely and that I would have a pretty looking dress before long, then I got into the troublesome stage where the mistakes started to happen.  How this first mistake did happen, I have no idea.  When I got the bodice complete, the armholes were too small.  I have made a different dress from this pattern before and I didn’t have any trouble with it, so why this happened now, I don’t know.  I was ready to scrap the project, that has always been my solution to sewing mistakes in the past, but not this time.  I have to learn to fix my mistakes, right?  I unpicked seams and re-cut the armholes and tried again.  So far so good…

I got the rest of the dress done and then started the dreaded zipper.  I have no problems with the actually sewing in the zipper, but with the last dress from this pattern that I made, I had trouble getting the zipper put in the right spot.  Way too much of the back was cut off to make the dress fit properly and the top gaped out a bit with that one and this one as well.  Using the last dress’s finished measurements, I tried to make adjustments to this one.

I didn’t like the look of it the first time, so I tried again.  Too baggy in the back now, so one more time.  (I am not a fan of seam ripping, but I am getting better with this.)  Three times was all I was doing, and it ended up looking okay.  But not okay enough, so a few days later, I undid the zipper and tried one more time.

The finished product:  I wasn’t too crazy about how my armhole adjustments ended up.  They fit okay, I just think they look somewhat messed with, but that is probably a detail only I am noticing.  I also was a little disappointed with how the sheer part on top didn’t lie flat against my body.  I did all of the adjustments that I was able to do without starting to make the dress noticeably look like it has things wrong with it.  When I make this pattern again, which I will, I am gonna try and do a side inserted zipper.  I think that will help a lot of my fitting problems with this particular dress.

All of that aside, I still really like the dress and I will be wearing it the first chance I get – maybe on Friday when I have errands to run.  I don’t know if the dress ended up looking fancy enough for me for the party I am going to.  I think a nicer fabric choice would have made the difference.  Or maybe since I spent so much time unpicking seams I am way too familiar with the mistakes that I made to say it isn’t nice enough.  However, not wearing the dress this Sunday is totally fine by me, because this just means that I get to go shopping for a dress, and I already picked out two that I cannot decide between.  Really, I am up to my eyeballs in dresses this month, so this very well may be the only dress I end up making for March…

And so concludes another post all about a dress.  I am noticing a theme here…  I might have to write about shoes or something other than dresses next time.  Or maybe just a photo only post…

For those who made it to the end, thanks for reading!