Tuesday, August 2, 2011

coffee date dress... sorta

A year ago for my sister's birthday when I had just started sewing, my sister asked me for a dress for her birthday. I made her a dress and a matching purse.  She loved the way that it turned out even though I had used the wrong kind of fabric for the style of the dress.  
because of the wrong kind of fabric, the dress turned out not quite right



it looked nice but it was like she was wearing a bag that was gathered at the waist with a sash.
Oh, and she wouldn't let me take her measurements at the time she would only let me know her bra size, so getting something that would be more fitted at the time was not possible.
Well when the idea of her having a wedding shower came up, she wanted to wear the dress I had made her.  She tried it on again and realized that she didn't really like the way that it fit.  So she asked me if there was anyway that I could make it more fitted.  I told her that she would actually have to let me measure her if the dress was going to fit correctly and she finally agreed.  I decided to use the fabric from the dress and make a new dress from it.  She said she wanted the bodice to be fitted and the skirt to be a-line and if possible to still have gathering at the neckline.  I figured the coffee date dress on burdastyle.com was close and I figured out,through lots of pattern alterations, how to still have gathering at the neckline.  Since my sister and I have very similar measurements, I decided to make the dress up for me to see if my alterations worked out before I cut into the original dress.
front
back
side.
With the dress I made for my sister, I made just one more alteration and that was to square out the neckline.
front
back
side.
close up of the gathering on the neckline.
She also asked that there still be a band of black on the bottom
and she asked that I put some kind of a label in the dress so that she can tell everyone that her sister made the dress for her
she was very happy with how the dress turned out and so am I!  I was also very glad that I kept the extra fabric last year because I needed it to finish the dress, otherwise she would have had half a skirt!













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