dress: self-made // shoes: Chelsea Crew

You guuys, the day has come. I’ve been drowning* under a mountain** of end-of-semester papers and assignments but it’s finally all done!! I celebrated on Sunday by spending literally all day working on a dress. I woke up at 9am and worked all the way until 11pm when I physically had to stop and sleep on a heating pad because spending all day hunched over your sewing machine is apparently not good for one’s back. Especially when one strangely prefers sewing on the floor. Yikes.

This dress has been on my Sewing Inspiration board for ages. It’s one of the first Dear Creatures dresses I fell in love with and I had a vague idea of how I wanted to recreate it. I even bought the fabric for it weeks ago but I knew it was going to be a long process because of all the pintucks***. It was very involved but turned out to be the perfect project for a sewing-starved maniac.

I started off with a muslin (even though I never make muslins– shhh!) because I was only 95% sure my idea would work. I used the bodice from M6646 as a template, and traced it onto a sheet of paper. I measured where I wanted the pleats to go, and then marked cutting lines for each pleat. I did 8 pleats 3/4″ apart on the bodice, 4 pleats 3/4″ apart on the straps, and 6 pleats 1/2″ apart on the skirt****. All the pleats are 1/4″ pleats (well, except the ones that went wibbly).

Then I pretty much just cut each “slice” off and taped it 1/2″ away. And then I remembered that this pattern has a seam down the front center which I didn’t want so I marked and cut off the seam allowance.

And this is what I ended up with.

Andd then I did the same for the other bodice pieces. I did rework the sweetheart shape a bit so I had to compensate for that in the adjoining pieces.

And voila! Each piece took ages. But once the bodice was done, the skirt was much easier since it was just a rectangle. I had two 22″ x 23″ rectangles so I used the longer side as the length. I think I would have needed another 6″ or so to make the full 12 pleats and not have this end up a peplum top.

But squee! It’s done!

*Ok, drowning’s a bit dramatic.

**And no, I have no idea how one would drown under a mountain.

***I literally spent an hour looking up types of pleats because I could not for the LIFE of me remember the word “pintuck” or how to do them properly. I read about accordion pleats, box pleats, pinch pleats, knife pleats, etc. and eventually gave up and just went with my gut (I’d done them once before but it was ages ago). And then I posted a photo of the dress on Flickr and someone commented on “all the pintucks” and I was like *facepalm*.

****I stopped at 6 because I was worried the skirt would be too short if I did the full 12 since I only bought 2 yards of fabric. I might go back and add at least two more.