Fantastic birthday dress

This was supposed to be my birthday dress, but it ended up being finished a tad too late. Or rather my birthday celebration happened a bit too early, and it simply took too long to finish the dress. So intention wise it was a birthday dress, and in reality it is a fantastic summer dress for me to enjoy this summer!

One of the reasons why I was late to finish the dress on time for my birthday party was it being a really complex make. It was clear from the onset that it would be, but hey – there were hopes, and they ended up vanishing 🙂 On the flip side of all matters, this design is a really good one, it works well and I’m happy to recommend it. So here’s a bit of a story about this fun project.

I wanted to make this dress for as long as this pattern exists. It is pattern S9329 from last year’s Mimi G collection for Simplicity patterns, I bought it right when it hit the stores. The main thing that I was fixated on was this open back. Last year I made another open back dress, but it was clearly not enough! 🙂 Initial plan was to make it out of fuchsia pink cotton. But then, first, I ran out of time for summer projects last year, and then this doubt crept in, for it would have been a terribly screaming dress (open back, fuchsia color, and all that). And then I purchased this linen in blue palm leaves print and the deal was sealed.

Linen usually wrinkles badly, but this one doesn’t really. I pre-washed it, and pressing it was easy breezy. The challenge with this design of a dress was that you can’t quite put paper pattern blocks on a dress form and see straight away whether particular size would work or not. If you want to test the design, you actually need to make half of the dress first. So it was a bit opportunistic approach that I used – no toile was made, I just cut pattern pieces, made sleeves and then tacked the bodice lining pieces together with sleeves to see what’s up and down. Initially the bodice was cut in size 10 and from midriff down – in size 14. That’s what the pattern suggested according to my body measurements. Upon inspecting my hand-tacked bodice situation I had to conclude that at the very least the midriff and skirt would need to get reduced to size 12. This I did along with a number of other adjustments that are provided below.

This dress is absolutely stunning! But… I have to say that it should be looking the best on someone who has wide straight shoulders and full bust, and I have neither. Regardless, I wanted this dress so much, that I chose to ignore sub-optimal design for my body type 🙂 However, at the very least I was determined to adjust it to look flattering on me the best I could. So here’s what I did:

• The front of the bodice has princess seams. Original cut made the front too roomy, so I needed to trim the inside piece a bit to make it narrower and thus lay flatter on my chest. I think I took off some 1 cm on each side to reduce the bust fullness.
• I cut V-neck opening to be shallower to make sure the neckline was not gaping. I find it so important to attach interfacing tape to those deep V-necklines (in this case, it is a faux-wrap bodice situation, but still, effectively it produces a V-neckline). Interfacing tape prevents the fabric from stretching and makes for a nicely laying V-neckline (the same was also very important for my beautiful vest neckline).
• There was a real head-scratcher about the innards of the dress. My initial plan was to line the bodice. Since the back is so open, a regular bra would not work in this case, and so regardless of what solution I might be using to address that, I wanted the front of the dress to be completely non-transparent. However, lining the bodice was not straightforward due to fancy raglan sleeves. Initially I was unsure how to install the lining. After contemplating quite a bit, I ended up lining it just like I would line a vest. So the bodice is fully lined with white batiste. There is a picture below showing the inside of the dress. This lining solution also allowed me to avoid top stitching of any sort in this dress, which is so fancy in my view!
• Finally, when the dress was pretty much done, I had to conclude that even though I had gone down by one size for the skirt, the midriff was still a bit wide for me. So I used 2 cm seam allowance for center back seam, instead of designated 1.5 cm.
• All in all, when the dress is now finished and I have now had a chance to wear it around the house, I think I should have gone one more size down all over the place. So if this design gets used one more time, I should probably cut the bodice in size 8 and from midriff down – in size 10. Normally, my usual Simplicity of McCall’s size is 10 to 12 from top down.

This dress design features all possible dress complications there might be: faux-wrap bodice, midriff, fancy sleeves with pleats, sleeve binding (not just simple elastic), pockets, invisible zipper. All these elements in combination make this dress so sophisticated! To maintain clean finish, I decided to avoid top stitching of any kind. Sleeves binding and midriff facing are attached by stitching in the ditch. Hem is finished using blind stitch that I made on the machine using blind hem foot.

So yes – it is a lovely lovely dress. Even for my narrow shoulders I think it can absolutely work and create loads of joy! 🙂

For this dress I used 2 meters of this gorgeous linen that I had bought at my local fabric store. In fact I ran out of fabric for all 4 pocket pieces, so the inner or front pocket pieces were cut out of the lining fabric. For bodice lining I used some 0.5 meters of white cotton batiste. The pattern used here is Simplicity S9329. Other notions used were: 25 cm invisible zipper, a bit of interfacing for midriff and interfacing tape for few seams, and coordinating threads (white and navy blue). This dress cost me 25 Eur. It was made in June 2023 (was meant to be finished for my birthday on 12 of June, but in fact was finished the next day 🙂 ).

I absolutely love it! It was one of those passion projects 🙂 Something I wanted very much even knowing that it might not be worn all that much due to being simply too fancy for my regular daily life 🙂 It may be worn for one or another summer event, or concert, or fancy dinner, but yeah, that’s pretty much it. Regardless, I’m very happy how it turned out. I should absolutely stop making dresses right about now as there are already too many of them hanging in the closet. But then, there are like 10 different awesome fabrics in my stash meant for summer dresses, so what do you do with all that! Yeah, I don’t know, who knows what’s gonna happen next! 🙂

Thanks for visiting my blog and I’ll see you next time!

~Giedre~