I guess I’m into flounces? I was inspired to make this after seeing Jess Sews Clothes’s version (she makes amazing clothes). Sewing your own clothes gives you a lot of insight into what you actually like to wear, as opposed to what fits and happens to be available, and I’m slightly surprised to find that I’m drawn to sleek, modern silhouettes with sculptural elements. Funny, I always thought I was kind of a vintage gal, but the things I actually want to make are more modern than I might have expected.
This is Vogue 1513, a Badgley Mischka pattern, and I’m not sure I would have chosen to make it if I’d just seen the picture on the pattern. Actually, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have. Something about the angle of the photograph makes the dress look oddly elongated and boring. I think it looks a lot more exciting in a fitted version, on a person with a curvier silhouette. I also loved the lined flounce Jess included; the pattern doesn’t call for that, but who can resist a lined flounce in an exciting color?
The pattern is quite involved, but not actually too head-scratchingly difficult. The interfacing is applied directly to the dress fabric (not the lining), and the instructions call for a lot of hand-sewing (the armscyes, attaching the lining to the zipper, the hem). You could probably find ways around that, but I didn’t mind. I had to give a talk in Pennsylvania this week and really enjoyed hand-sewing the various elements on my flight. (Don’t know what my seatmates thought, don’t care.) The flounce is actually not hard at all; it’s attached in the princess seams and to the collar. You have to sew through a bunch of layers of fabric by the time you get to the collar, but my serger made short work of that.
For this dress, I used a black ponte from Joann and a stretch polyester satin from the L.A. Fashion District. The ponte is actually very high-quality and nice to work with. The satin was a pain: lots of fraying and puckering seams. But it is, after all, the lining, so I didn’t worry too much about it.
I wasn’t sure what size to cut, since the pattern calls for a woven or a heavyweight knit. Should I have made a muslin? Yes. But the whole project seemed so daunting that I felt like if I didn’t just start it, I’d never work up the will to complete it. I went with an 18, which was more or less my measurements. I lowered the apex by two inches, and considered a full-bust adjustment, but figured, what the hell, it’ll stretch.
It did stretch! It ended up being way too big. I wasn’t sure how to handle it, since of course I hadn’t basted the seams, being a genius, but sewed them with a hard-to-pick stretch stitch. I fiddled and pinned and marked and basted — in the end, yes, it would undoubtedly have been faster to make a muslin. I ended up taking both side seams in by about one and a half inches and also took a chunk out of the armscyes.
I was really upset to find that the side seams had puckered and sort of stuck out in weird places after all that imprecise mangling. But after sleeping on it and trying the dress on again, I decided that it’s not actually that noticeable, and in fact I’m very happy with it.
I thought it’d be a good dress for a keynote I gave today in Chicago, and it was! Someone in the audience who knew I sew asked me during the Q&A if I’d made my dress, and I was excited to tell everyone that yes, I had! Afterward a grad student came up to tell me that she sewed, too, and got the pattern number from me. That was cool!
All in all, a really satisfying dress to sew. Victory! I’m relieved it’s over, too, and I can move on to quicker things. I’d really like to make a couple of tops out of the merino and silk I’ve been hanging on to. But first, of course, Dora demands her own version. Obviously, this is an absurd dress to make for a five-year-old, but duty calls!
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