Two new dresses

One of the things I did over my break/vacation was to sew a couple of dresses. I had gone in search of dresses in the shops over my LAST break, and came away disappointed. So many of the dresses now are in rather sad, drab colors that make me look ill (I said to my mom: "These look like "1970s malaise" colors" and she agreed - a very dark burnt orange, a dark muddy purple, grey, and sort of a moss green - but a greyed-down moss green, not a pretty moss green - were ones that we saw). Also, a lot of the dresses are now made of some kind of synthetic material that feels a bit like swimsuit fabric - NOT good for me, as I'm someone who "runs hot" and I get very uncomfortable in that kind of thing. So I came away disappointed.

This time, instead, I went to the fabric store and picked out patterns and fabric. It took far less time to do this than it did to even LOOK for a dress in the shops, as I found two patterns right away I liked. (And as it turned out - for the second dress - I had a large piece of fabric I had bought years ago, never sewn up, and left at my parents' house, so I used that for the second of the two dresses).

For the first dress I found a very nice sprigged cotton. It has a white background with tiny rose-colored and yellow flowers on it. (The print doesn't show up well at all in the photos, which is why I'm describing it). It's a nice weight, I think it's what they used to call a "dress-weight cotton" because while it's firm enough, it also has some drape - it's softer and more loosely woven than the typical crisp quilting cotton. (I did look at those to see if there were any prints that I liked even better, but I kept coming back to this cotton, and in the end, chose it.)

The pattern I used is Simplicity 2174, view C. I have to say my estimation of the Simplicity line has gone up *considerably* - a few years ago, looking for patterns, I only saw shapeless, unfitted garments in their catalog and bitterly remarked to my mother that it looked like they were making patterns for people who hated to sew.

Because, one of the points of sewing for yourself - but one of the challenging parts and the part that takes some skill and experience - is to fit the dress or whatever to your own body, rather than going with the very broad "small, medium, or large" categories that so many of the commercial clothing companies use now.

Well, this pattern is from their "Amazing Fit" line, which I hope is going to be a new staple of their catalog, because this pattern was fantastic. It went together VERY well, it was easy enough to sew on, even for someone who hadn't done much dressmaking in the past 7 or 8 years. And it came with different side-front bodice pieces: the one you used depended on your cup size. So it fit much better than the "standard" pattern. (A lot of the "standard" patterns used to be scaled to, I think, a B cup, so if you're bigger or littler, you either have to play around with darts or put up with something that fits in a less-than-ideal way).

They also offered some suggestions on how to fit the pattern. I followed their advice to sew all the "important to fit" seams with a machine-basting stitch first, then try on the garment to see if it fit right. (I did fit the paper pieces to myself first - which was an important step as well, because as it turned out, the only adjustment I needed to make to the pattern was to lengthen the bodice - it was too short-waisted for me. But that's an easy, easy fix to do, much easier than redrafting a sleeve to be wider, which I've also done).

I think part of the reason it fit so well was that for once I swallowed my vanity and bought the pattern based on my actual measurements, rather than the numerical size. Because of "vanity sizing" in commercial clothes, sewing patterns tend to make you require a size or two bigger than what you buy in commercial clothes. (It even happens to my mom, who is slender). So I admit, as I sewed on the first dress, I felt a bit "down" about the actual size I had to buy, as it's a bigger number than I'm used to. (It was especially painful as the size trend I'd been seeing in buying clothes was a slightly downward one.)

But then I tried the dress on.



It fits better than just about any commercial dress I've had. (It actually felt a bit loose as I put it on tonight; it felt tighter when I tried it on up in Illinois. Surely the extra percentage humidity up there doesn't make one's body swell THAT much?)

Here's another photo. One thing they don't show is the clever pocket treatment - there is a yoke and pocket lining that attaches to the side front skirt pieces and makes big but not very visible pockets in the dress. And as someone who teaches, I have to have pockets - I don't like to carry my purse into the classroom, and I need somewhere to keep my keys and my chalk-chock and my flashdrive. So I was very appreciative of the pockets on this.



(Gah, you can see that I have cardboard boxes I need to break down for recycling. And I have way too many cookbooks. And also gah, I look at myself and think now that I need to do some kind of exercises to try to tighten up the waist and abdominal muscles.)

This is kind of a dark photograph, but you can see the pockets a little bit here:



I'd definitely make this pattern again, maybe out of a darker fabric. Maybe even a dark brown or dark blue small calico pattern.

I made a second dress. This one is less fitted and didn't come with different bodice pieces for different cup sizes. But I still think it turned out well. Especially considering that the fabric was a slippery, shifty rayon (it had almost a satin weave to it) and it was very challenging to match the plaids. (And yes, I tend to get a little obsessive about that. I used Simplicity 2449, view B, for this one, but modified the pattern slightly - the pattern called for using 1" ribbon as trim at the waist and on the sleeve cuffs, but I thought that since I had extra fabric on hand, it would look nicer to cut bias strips and use them instead of ribbon. (And I think that was a good decision; I think it makes the dress look more sophisticated). Again, the only pattern modification I had to do was to make it more long-waisted.



I'm especially pleased with how this turned out, considering that the fabric fought me every step of the way. (And again, on this one, I sewed all the "crucial to fit" seams - the side front and side back and side seams - as machine basting first, then tried the dress on to be sure it fit right.)

I also think this dress might look a little better on me (judging from the photos) than the other one; I guess I do look better in stronger, more jewel-toned type colors. (But the other dress, even if you can't tell it from the photos, has a more perfect fit.)

At any rate - I think I spent maybe 8 hours total on the first dress (that includes "hand picking" the zipper - I think zippers look better and are easier to do if you hand-sew them in with a tiny backstitch, than if you try to do them on the machine. And also, there's less chance of making a catastrophic mistake when you do it by hand). And I think I maybe spent 10 hours on the purple dress, mainly because it required much heavier pinning of the seams, and the effort to match the plaids. (And also cutting it out took a LOT longer - and my mom did most of that - because of the need to match plaids.)

But, in the long run, it was a lot less exhausting and frustrating than going shopping for a dress - even with the effort at working with the plaid, there is something very satisfying about being able to sit down and put a pattern for a dress together successfully.