a party dress

You might remember that I mentioned here I'd been helping a friend sew her wedding dress over the last few months. Well, that wedding was this weekend and I'm happy to report that her dress was gorgeous and the wedding was wonderful fun. I don't have any photos yet of her outfit because at her request I shot film all day. My original plan was to stay out of the way of their official wedding photographer and shoot detail shots and so forth, but it turned out that he was delighted to have another photographer running around and kept having his assistant call me over to shoot at some of the portraits. So I ended up learning a lot of new stuff about wedding photography, which was fantastic- but I have no pictures until the film is developed!

For my outfit I ended up sewing up one of the vintage wedding dress patterns (Simplicity 5872) in the shorter length. I want to practice bodice fitting with sleeves, and this dress really showed that I've got some practice ahead of me. Here's the inside of the bodice, the silk-cotton basted onto silk organza.





I decided that I'd just skip the muslin & jump into making this dress since the measurements were pretty close and I was rather crunched on time. My fitting mostly involved basting the seams, trying on, and slight tweaking from there. First I moved the armscye in by a quarter inch, which ended up being not quite enough since I still had trouble raising my arms entirely overhead. And I also should have widened the sleeve pieces by about a quarter inch to a half inch since they were just a little too tight.



The trim is a length of organza ribbon with beading applied to it which I bought at MJ Trim to baste onto the dress along the empire seam.



During the construction, I'd posted a plea for help with the material to artisan's square sewing board, since I was having a terrible time with the pressing. I got some good advice to try to mainly press from the wrong side, which I mostly stuck to. Here's a view of the dress on Charlotte in the middle of a round of pressing.



So next up, I'm going to play with the bust dart placement and try to fix the sleeve issue. I have a nice black/tan print cotton to make another version of this dress in and I'll see if I can't get a better bodice fit this time around.