Summer vacation dress

This one will most likely be the last summer dress I’ve made this year – there is not much point in continuing sewing summer clothes in August. Autumn prep should be starting. But boy, is this dress lovely! 🌟 I made it specificaly for summer vacation and it served the purpose nicely. 🙂

Starting with the fabric, this was one of only four remaining summer fabrics in my stash. I bought it last year without any particular purpose, and later on came up with few good ideas for it. This fabric is cotton with a little bit of stretch, and it might have made for a nice shirt dress. But since I already own few of those, I decided to rather try something new. Mindy dress by Fibremood became “something new” this time.

I decided on few adjustments to the original Mindy design. The first change was the idea of tiered skirt. Initially I was planning to make three tiers and thus – long dress. But in the middle of the process my husband stepped in with especially strong opinion about the length of the dress 😁 And thus it ended up being knee length double tier dress.

Another change concerned the sleeves. Honestly I was not too fond of the original sleeves – it seemed to me that their elbow length will be pulling the entire sleeve down the shoulder. So I figured, if I shortened the sleeves, maybe they would stay puffier around the shoulders. But that was not what have happened. I shortened the sleeves by 10 cm. But they do not sit all that well anyway. When hands move, they tend to get pulled into the underarms and are not too comfortable. It seems to me now that sleeves design or cut is suboptimal. Or I made them too short after all. One way or another, I do not think I will ever use this pattern again.

When it comes to putting this dress together, it is a rather simple design to make. I started with the bodice. After quite a bit of trying on, I decided to make the bodice a bit more narrow than designed, that’s why I stitched at 1.5 cm seam allowances, instead of designated 1 cm. However, when the dress was finished, it became apparent that this small adjustment had not been necessary. It is likely that those 2 cm that I took in by increasing seam allowances, would have made the dress more comfortable to wear and less tight.

Next, sleeves followed. They had to get gathered and attached to the neck trim, and then all that was attached to the bodice. The most tricky part was to install the neckline facing, as it had to be done neatly and cover the seam where the trim got attached to the bodice.

When that was done, the rest was pretty straightforward. The skirt is just few gathered panels. I hemmed the dress using my 4mm rolled hem foot. Then I installed short invisible zipper into the left side seam and finally closed the side seams. And thus my new dress was complete!

To make this dress I needed 1.75 m of cotton fabric in tiny stripes which I bought at my local fabric store. The pattern used here was Fibremood Mindy dress design, I cut it in size 8. Other notions were: a little bit of lightweight interfacing, 0.5 m of 5 mm elastic, 20 cm invisible white zipper, and coordinating thread. This dress cost me 20 Eur. It was made at the end of July, 2021.

Ok, now, this dress is not ideal. I should have installed pockets, but somehow decided not to. While wearing the dress now I miss pockets badly 🙂 I am also not too happy about sleeves design. And probably the neckline lies a little bit too low for my liking – shoulder trims could have been a tiny bit shorter. But overall I like the dress regardless and wore it happily multiple times already! It is a joyfull and very much entertaining garment. It is summer-vacation-kind-of relaxed and happy dress! 😎

Let’s all stay healthy!

~Giedre~