The Bow Dress

Awhile back my mom let me raid her material stash and take home a few yards.  Yes, best mom ever, right? When I spotted some white and some black material, this picture from Pinterest came to mind.  The original source of the photo is Street Style Aesthetic.

Pretty, right?  I absolutely love the silhouette.  So I attempted to make my own.   Remember my polka dot dress?  I love that bodice pattern, but I had to do some SERIOUS work to make the top fit.

I traced the pattern on some tissue paper and made my changes that I thought would help.  And what do you know … it was a total disaster.  I didn’t leave enough room for seam allowances and I basically just messed it up.  Really badly.  So I bought some new fabric for $4 from Wal-Mart the next time I went grocery shopping.  Don’t hate me because I’m so glamorous.

After over a month of trial and error, this is what I came up with!  It doesn’t even look like my inspiration picture up there, which may be my favorite part about it.  DIY is all about taking things and making them your own, right?

The bodice still doesn’t fit like I’d like it too.  The darts go up too high and I had to redo the sleeves fourteen gazillion times to bring in the extra material around the neckline.  But maybe no one would notice that unless I said something?  Which I just did?  Ha!

I squared the neckline, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.  And the sleeves were a happy accident.  I just rolled them up to see where I wanted to hem them and happened to like the look as is.  So the sleeves aren’t even hemmed at all.  I’m not sure how official that is, but I’m going to go with very.  Very official.

I decided to do a bow instead of a ruffle.  Right now it’s pinned on to the dress in case I want to take it off.  So far I like the bow on there.

For the skirt, I just made it up as I went along.  Not in one those I’m-so-talented-I-can-just-sew-whatever-is-in-my-head kind of ways.  More of those I-don’t-have-the-patience-to-find-a-pattern-or-figure-out-how-to-do-this-the-right-way kind of methods.  The waistband of this skirt is very scary.  If you could only look on the inside of this dress, you would be appalled.

But hey, it’s not what’s on the inside that counts, right?

For the skirt portion, I just took the entire width of the material, gathered it, and sewed it into my scary waistband.  This was the one event of the dressmaking process that went smoothly.

All in all, I love my dress.  It was definitely a huge learning adventure.  I’ll probably make more skirts this way – it was super easy!  Except I’ll find out how to make a proper waistband.  As for the bodice, I’m done trying to alter that silly pattern.  I’m going to go buy it in the smaller size.   The pattern I have only goes down to size 12 and I think I need an 8 or something.

So what about you guys?  Anyone done any sewing lately?  Any experimenting with altering patterns? Any successful experimenting?  Ha!

~Whitney