D is for Dress

My cousin got married this weekend. Yay! I made the dress I wore to the wedding. So here are the Details.


I'm on the right and the other two are my cousins. The bride on the left and her sister the matron of honor in the middle.

I actually started this last summer, but when I finished attaching the pieces together and went to put in the zipper, it was quite a bit too big. Since I was frustrated I decided to finish up the sleeves while cooling off and deciding how to fix the largeness of the top. I threaded the sleeve elastic in and sewed the ends together, then I closed up the hole that it went in through and just as I was cutting the thread I felt a snap and the elastic popped open. So there was a loose piece of elastic in the sleeve. I can only assume that in my frustration I did a poor job of attaching it, because I'm normally very careful when it comes to sewing elastic because I don't want it to suddenly pop open and my skirt's waist is 2 yards wide all of a sudden or anything. I was so mad, and did the most mature thing I could do, I wiped a few hot tears of anger, crumpled the dress up as much as I could and threw it into my closet where I wouldn't have to look at it.

About a month ago I started thinking about what I would wear to my cousin's wedding, and upon remembering this dress I pulled it out.

I couldn't take in fabric on the sides to make the bodice tighter because then the sides of the neckline would pull too far out to the sides. First I took out the seam between the bodice and the skirt and put in the top of the zipper so that I could zip it and measure how much needed to be taken in accurately.



Then I took in two little pleats in the front with about 1.5 inches in between them. This is measuring 3/4" from the center pin.



And making sure it's even all the way down.



Then I reattached the skirt leaving the extra fabric in the back, and carefully put in the rest of the zipper and sewed shut the back seam without leaving and weird bumps where the connections were.

Close up on the box pleats.


The sleeves were not working for me at all. So I tore them out and folded under the edges around the armhole and stitched it up.

Hemmed the bottom.

And stitched some buttons on the front to help tie in the pleats.



It only took about 2 hours once I picked it back up which surprised me because I was just so sure it would take forever to get it right when it wasn't working last summer.

It took awhile to figure out what to do with my hair. I knew it would be hot and humid so it had to be up, but I didn't want it to just be the normal braid or bun. I'm not really big into doing things with my hair. I ended up doing two French braids and then pinning them up in the back. This is at the end of the day, thus the frizziness.



I wanted to wear a hat, but I didn't have one and I figured it might be weird. Something like this with the small flat top and a hat pin to hold it on rather than ribbons.

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In the end it was a lovely day, a bit hot, but there was a nice breeze most of the time and the rain held off until the clean-up was finishing up.