Maxi dress

With maxi dresses being so "on trend" now, I thought I should jump on the bandwagon, but I wasn't quite willing to pay the store prices. Soooooo, I'll just make one!

It started with a trip to the fabric store where Jess and I ended up buying way too much fabric. You'd think that we'd have it figured out by now, but we usually go there with only a vague idea in mind so we always err on the side of too much fabric than not enough. Which usually means we have lots left over. Good thing Mom has agreed that we can store all fabric at her house :) We bought a few different options that day, and I chose to start with this striped one. It's pushing me out of my comfort zone for sure.

The fabric is completely man-made (not a natural fibre in it!) and is the magic kind that will travel well as it's resistant to wrinkling. It has a good amount of stretch to it, so I used a stretch stitch on the sewing machine. It does two stitches forward and one back, so that when you pull on the fabric it doesn't break the thread. It does take a lot of thread to sew this way (so take that into consideration when purchasing notions) and is horrible! if you need to rip stitches out.

This was a bit of a "Project Runway" experiment in that I wasn't working from a pattern. The original plan was to basically make a tank-top dress, but as we were draping the fabric it looked pretty good with a cowl neckline and then we thought it should have the diagonal skirt. Already we were way off the "long tank" idea and we hadn't even started! But I still used a t-shirt I have as the starting point for size. Folded the fabric, folded the shirt, and did a best-guess cut around the outside for the back of the shirt.

For the front, I draped it about where I wanted the cowl to be with the salvage edge, held it at the point of the inside of the shoulder seam (where the neckline would start to fall) and laid that on the back already cut out. Pinned it together along the shoulder seams and stretched it out along the waistline so those would be the same front and back. I cut it out and sewed it together while it was still pinned.

You can see here that I needed to take in a lot in the side seams. I guessed too generously!

I wanted the dress to have the waistline up at my actual waist, so I needed to cut off about 5 inches of material off the bottom to shorten it up. Again, I didn't consider this part when I was originally cutting the top. Good thing we did buy all the extra material!

Since I had used the salvage edge for the front of the neckline, I only needed to do a small fold-over along the back of the neck to make that a smooth edge.

For the skirt, I used one that I already had as a guide. I wanted it to be as wide as the current skirt at the bottom, so I laid it out on the material and measured 42 inches up from there for the length. This was more than ample as I'm no where near that tall, but I knew I would need some extra for the seam allowance at the waist and would hate to end up with a skirt that's too short. Once I had the one side of the skirt cut out, I just folded it in half so I could match up the angle for cutting along the top.

To cut the second skirt piece, I just overlaid the first one over the second so that I would be sure to match up the angle on the lines. Pinned it, cut it and sewed it.

You can see that I had a lot of skirt as I look like the "after" picture for a weigh loss ad, though I'm not quite there yet :)

Since I had so much skirt, I used several small tucks to get it to match the size of the top.

And.... it ends up that I have a giant sack with no shape to it.

I took it in by 2 inches on each side. Basically eased it in from the arm hole down to the hips.

I'm not sure you can quite see it in this picture unless you can zoom in, but there are several lines of sewing there as I make my various attempts at getting this to fit.

Then Jess suggested that it looked more finished with sleeves, so time to add those. I used more tucks along the top of the sleeve to ease that fabric in and to have it match the skirt.

Once it was all done was when I was able to cut it off to the final length. I cut it at 37 inches. You can see from the image that I didn't end up with a straight hemline even though I had cut them the same along both sides. When I asked Mom about this later, she said it can happen when using a stretch stitch if you don't sew the two seams the same way (i.e. start sewing both seams at the waistline). Something to keep in mind!

And tada! Finally finished. It took much longer than anticipated as I had to do so many adjustments. I would guess 12-14 hours total.

I took a self-portrait in my back yard so you don't just see the finished product in the basement.

When I see it now, it looks more formal (can you say that about a striped maxi dress made of stretch fabric?) than I had originally envisioned, so time to experiment with the other fabric I bought!
~Lisa