Hello all! Today’s project is the remaking of a dress that Mum dontated to me because the fabric was just too good to pass up on.

So let’s have a look at the original dress. It’s a size 14 (I’m a size 8) made from a red cotton broderie anglaise. The neckline and armhole edges are finished with a visible bias trim and there is a zip in the CB seam. The hem has an embroidered scalloped edge. Originally I wanted the bodice design to stay pretty much the same but the larger size meant that the shoulders were too wide for me, so I went with a strappy bodice design instead with a pencil skirt to complete the dress.

Before cutting out the skirt, I wanted to do a little finessing of my skirt block pattern. I used an old tablecloth to make a mock up, sharpie-ing on all of the horizontal and vertical lines to make it easier to find any fit issues. The main adjustment that I made was a Prominent Hip Bone Adjustment which as detailed in Fitting and Pattern Alteration is when the fabric is taut over the hip bones causing diagonal lines. You can see the changes that I made to my pattern below. I then pegged in the sides of the hem to make it more of a pencil skirt.

I used my bodice block as a base for the top half of my dress, rotating all of the darts into the side seam, drawing on a lower neckline and splitting the back bodice into two pieces. I cut the skirt out of the skirt piece from the original dress first, hoping to cut the bodice pieces from the original bodice. Unfortunately someone had already shortened the bodice, making my front bodice piece too long, so I had to cut that out of the skirt pieces as well. I did unpick the binding to reuse but I cut fresh binding out as I had the spare fabric to.

When the dress was all cut out and put together I ended up pinching excess out of the neckline and adding it to the bust darts so that it would lay flat. I also pinched bits out of the CB to better match the contours of my body.

The zip was hand picked in, but that was the only handsewing that I did as all of the binding was topstitched and the fact that there was no hemming to do! The reason that the zipper pull isn’t all the way up is because my boyfriend pulled it off the dress when he was zipping me up just before we left. Luckily it was fixable with the good old dressers trick of cutting into the zip on one side at the bottom and threading it back on. I just now need to make sure that the top of the zip is reinforced so that doesn’t happen again!

I love this dress. It feels super elegant, but also still young. I wore it on the beach with a silk shirt loosely tied around the waist and felt like superwoman! The only niggle I have with the fit is that the bust darts are too high. I want to lower them at least an inch on my next version. Oh and I need to add a slit to the centre back because my strides are much longer than the circumfrence of this hem!

Thanks so much for reading!

Lauren xx