Hello all,
Again I hope that you are all as well as you can be at this time. The past few months have been incredibly quiet for me as the theatre industry has shut down, and I’ve really tried to make the effort to do as much sewing as possible. After all, I’ve found myself saying on countless occasions, “oh, if only I had the time to make this…”, and now I do. So I’ve been trying to follow through on that, give my days a little bit of purpose and am just trying to learn as much as possible. This dress is one of the products of that time.
My friend Millie left me a pair of sheer Ikea curtains in the room that I inherited from her and I’ve always thought that they would make a great dress. I do also like and appreciate them as curtains though, so took the opportunity to cut them ‘to size’ as they originally grazed the floor. This left me with two 120cm long curtain bottoms to work with.
Then I had to decide what to make. Below you can see various (very rudimentary) sketches of my thoughts. I’m having a real backless phase at the moment, so decided to follow through on that idea, using the bodice pattern from a previous make, adding the changes I’d made to the last one. (You can see some of the changes listed on that scrap of pattern paper).
Most of my headscratching was about the skirt. First, I determined that each layer was going to be double the width of my previous layer (the first layer being double my waist measurement). Then after deciding on the total length of the skirt I had to work out the length of each skirt tier, and make sure that I had enough fabric! Eventually I worked out all of the maths and had all of my strips cut out. Tiers 2 and 3 were pieced to get to the correct length.
After everything was cut out, it was a case of putting everything together. (I also quickly cut out a rectangle the same width as my first tier out of an old bedsheet for a lining, because there was no way that I was going to get away with the skirt being unlined, the fabric being as sheer as it was.) The bodice was underlined with the same sheet.
The bodice and underlining were tacked together as one and then the darts were sewn. Then the ties were sewn and turned out and sandwiched between the bodice and the facing. The skirt was actually much quicker to gather up than anticipated. The underlining layer was gathered up with tier one at the front and a channel was made to thread the elastic through the back half of the skirt. The bodice was attached, and I did little thread loops under the bust at each side of the bodice to thread my ties through.
Then all that was left to do was hand roll the 192” hem. I reckon it took me 2.5 hours? Definitely as long as Dawn French’s live show on netflix plus a bit more. And then it was done! Overall, love this dress. Love it. In essence, it’s exactly what I wanted it to be. However, I have a few niggles. Niggle 1: The darts are a bit weird. One explanation is that they aren’t in quite the right place? The other explanation that I have come up with is that I rotated too much excess into the darts, and now they are too full for my bust. Because I took 3.5cm out of the neckline and 1cm out of the side seam and that was all rotated out through the dart I think I’ve put more ease into the bust than I need? Is that possible? Next time I’m debating trying to fold out the excess at the neckline instead of rotating it out and seeing how it compares. Oh, also the back waist is a bit droopy because a) I guess the weight of the skirt pulls it down and b) the elastic isn’t as taut is I’d like it to be because that’s the length that I need to get the dress over my hips.
Anyway, all in all, good dress. Especially for twirling.
Thank you for reading!
Lauren xx