Project 2

For February I made a dress and in doing so realized that I still have a lot to learn about fabric. The fabric and I had a few spats, but ultimately worked out our differences and agreed the final result.

Pattern: Modified Baby Doll Dress from
Wendy Mullin’s Sew U: Home Stretch

This took a few attempts to get right. At first it was simply an all brown dress that fit in the arms, but the bodice and neckline were pulled ridiculously low by the weight of the skirt (heaviest, slinkiest fabric ever) and the hemline came to rest about 5 inches above my ankles. It was the kind of dress that would have looked at home with some white sports socks and unassuming tennis shoes. So I decided to be bold and take 10 inches off the hem, not realizing that 10 inches would end up being about 15 once the fabric bounced back into place after purging the weight of the fabric I’d just removed. The result was a really inappropriate hemline. I seem to struggle with the fine line between sassy length and trampy length. This, my friends, was trampy.

After the overzealous scissor incident I spent the month looking at the dress, trying to figure out how to salvage it. Then I came across a pile of vintage dresses in my closet. I am not a vintage woman. My hips fit and my bust fits, but my waist will never be tiny enough. I’m pretty sure all the women who rocked 50s fashion were missing their lowest set of ribs.

So I took the waist out of the equation. I cut off the bottom hem of the vintage dress and easily attached it to the bottom of my dress. Then I cut the sleeves from the vintage and created a bias strip to use on the neckline to finish the edge and keep the neck from stretching with wear. I definitely didn’t do things in the right order, but this dress is kind of like the way I used to do Physics problems in high school… nothing was right about the process but, to the amazement of my teacher, I would somehow get the answers right.