Flowery Dress - the making of (Part 3)

Here we are at the 3rd instalment of the flowery dress. In the previous post, I'd just finished gathering the skirt, so next is sewing it onto the bodice.

Sewing the skirt and bodice together.

This is always an annoying process because there's so much material, plus you can't see what you're doing properly, plus I'm trying to gather the skirt at the same time so I'm trying not to catch lower folds of the skirt which is amazingly easy to do...

Once I've sewn the bodice and skirt together, I tidy up that seam by folding in the raw edges and seaming this edge.

...and that's pretty much it! The skirt was definitely the easiest and quickest bit! I can't remember if I wrote (in the first post) about the rest of the skirt goings on, but all I did was cut out two large rectangles, using the frill edge of the original item as the bottom of the skirt.

Anyway, here it is....

This is by FAR the best angle, which shows it to be fairly well fitting. It isn't really. Though it looks rather nice here! =)

Frillyness =) I don't generally like frills but these aren't too bad! (Can you spot the problem with the bodice?)

I love the way it gathers at the back. Sorry about the lame photos by the way... it was dark at the time, and SJ doesn't take great photos! Here's one of his... and this one actually shows the whole thing, in which you realise that it really doesn't work.

See how it fails!?! Yes this is a bad photo, taken from middle-ish height, but even so, you can see the issues. For a start, it's actually now too tight over my boobs (from trying to make it more fitted to fix the back problem, but also because the material has apparently absolutely NO give whatsoever). The belt - well I'm sure it could be at a better height, it just looks all wrong, although that could just be because the bodice makes me look like a whale! The skirt is the wrong shape for this sort of dress. There's a big loose bit under my boobs. And I could go on.

The best bit by far is the back of the dress. It's gorgeous. Sadly I have no good photos of it on! I will try and get some. The lace-up back just looks lovely, it gathers really nicely, and the belt tie finishes it off well. I lurrrrrve the back. I'll be doing lace-up backs again!

So, you can tell my future project... fix it so that the front is as good as the back! Basically what I needed to do was make the bodice fitted. I was trying to create the gathered back with a wide dress when all I really needed to do was have it a little loose around the waist with more skirt gather at the back that at the front.

Thankfully I need to move on to the dress this test one was intended for, though! Lucy's dress. Poor Juicy, I haven't even started her dress, and I promised it to her in July! So... I guess I'm going to do a fitted bodice for her. The rest of the dress I'll probably keep the same. Although I might just use a zip rather than a lace-up back coz it's easier and coz she's only little yet and prob shouldn't be showing off her skin so much!

I think if I'd done all these things on her dress it would have looked fine because she's only young and doesn't have the massive BOOOBS that I have, so I think it would have looked ok! But never mind.

The good thing about her dress is that it's going to be made out of THIS: =D

So obviously hers is going to be much better already!


Things I learned from making this dress:

+ Use material with some give for the bodice. This material didn't stretch at all, meaning that it was either too unfitted or too tight!
+ Cut skirt in a quarter circle or trapezoid to make it spin out better
+ Try it on with no clothes underneath when fitting!
+ Check bobbin often - it ran out and I didn't notice for about a quarter of the skirt circumference. That's a long way.
+ Mini seams are fab!
+ Pins are sharp... (cut myself twice! - not including the scratches gained from trying on the bodice with pins in it, eeek hehe)
+ The bodice probably needs to be small at the top and wide at the waist for the pull-to-back design to work
+ A lace up back only works on a fitted bodice! (This was my design flaw...)
+ Check exactly where I want the belt before cutting the fabric, and if not sure, leave plenty of space to decide!

So there we go. Hope you enjoyed my project! Look out for Lucy's Polka Dot Dress soon!