Adventures in Dressmaking!

I found a pattern and bought it on a whim.  It looked simple enough and I'd never used a pattern before, so it was exciting.  Then I scared myself into thinking I'd just screw it up and never even tried. 

 I was going to do this one, with a cowl:  

 ...

Like a year or something later?  More than that?  

Couple of years later, I bought fabric for this pattern.  My buddy Dani helped me pick out this fabric: 

 Isn't it cute?  I don't really own a lot of cute things.  I mean, yeah, it's still skulls but...  CUTE!  YAY! 


 Now, the pattern called for stretchy fabric and this was not, but I didn't want a zipper up my armpit either, so I decided to do panels on both sides of stretchy stuff.  

You know what I own even less of than cute clothes?  Pink. 

 Seriously.  Everything I owned before was red, black or brown.  Sometimes there were blue things.  Mostly black. 


I am le goth kid.  

And so it began!  I went to my mother for assistance, realizing that she had about as much experience using a pattern as I had.  She had done it once in the sixties and her story didn't exactly have a happy ending.  


Pinning up the fabric to then cut out the shapes: 

There was this tone of "Is this going to work?" throughout the process. 

 Of course, there were some mishaps.  One example being when we attached both panels to what would become the same side, instead of one on each: 

 Slowly, it began to become a thing: 

Thiiing: 

The cat was entirely unhelpful.  Please note that the rest of the table was clear at that point.  She managed to sit on ALL the dress fabrics.  

"I shall sit RIGHT ON ALL THE THINGS"
(The darker fabric in front of her is what we used for the second dress.) 



It fit!  We just needed the final touches aaand: 

BOOM BABY!  

The finished dress!  The pink, as stated, is stretchy.  The rest is not.  That means it's comfy enough when bending the elbows and (while it doesn't look it on the hanger) it's really form fitting.  The bottom of it wound up pleated just so it could be more fit to my body after the fact, so that's neat.  

WOOT.  I DID A THING.

Well,  WE did a thing.  My mother did a lot of the actual machine work because pushing pedals with my feet to make a loud thing go fast scares me whether it's a sewing machine or a car.  

I need to work on that.

But WOO a dress!