lizzardtears: June 2024

Monday, June 3, 2024

Mermaid dress

I wanted a fancy dress to welcome my next decade of life. I feel like humans should spend more time embracing aging as opposed to the negativity that goes along with it especially towards women. If you stop and think about it, if you don't age then you stop living, and what kind of life is that?

I was hoping to draft this dress somewhat on my own with franken-patterning, but that didn’t go so well. After hours of frustration I realized I needed to give up that idea and look for a ready-made pattern. By this point it was 17 days till the big day. I really liked Vogue Pattern V2931 but I was strapped for time and would have to order it, so I looked for and found a pdf pattern to buy. It wasn't perfect but should have worked. I printed it and was sorely disappointed. The pattern was lacking directions. The tiny bit it had was illegible English probably written using a very poor translator. With pieces that didn’t match the measurements provided with the pattern. I was not happy. I decided I just needed to cut my losses and buy the Vogue pattern. I know Vogue patterns are truly tested and work. By this time I had lost a full day. Fortunately I realized the first pattern was deficient before I cut my precious fabric! And so came the waiting game that comes with shipping. Finally the pattern arrived with 11 days to make a masterpiece.

Oh how I wanted to call out of work and be like “but I have this dress that I need to be sewing!!.” ha! like that would have gone over very well. I worked on the dress late every night and spent my weekends obsessing over the dress, and believe me I was obsessing. I had plenty of the taffeta but was very limited on the sequin fabric. The sequin fabric was a train cut off someone's dress some years back that I was able to snatch up, the crinoline was a cut off from a different dress and someone gave me the 8 yards of taffeta and I had the cute little fish decal , I ended up just having to buy thread, and some lining fabric.

The pattern was fairly straight forward. It has a lot of pieces so it took a long time to cut and sew. I did change up the bust since I wasn’t wanting a bow front. The pattern says to do the fashion fabric first but I thought it would be better to start out sewing the lining in case I had fit issues to figure out. I had a little bit of trouble with the structure piece because I tried to do some redesign which didn’t work and was a waste of time. Eventually I got it right even if it put me behind.

Finally I got to cutting out the taffeta which is always nerve racking. Especially since taffeta tends to be directional due to the sheen. I spent a lot of time placing the pattern pieces and figured a better way to cut it than the pattern suggested, I swear pattern makers waste more fabric on their cutting layouts. I ended up having two yards left over! Another thing I tried to do was a curly hem but the tulle I had wasn’t the right kind and it turned it instead of doing the cool flippy out thing. I attached that to the dress before discovering the problem though, and had to cut the hem off. I did learn though that you need a heavier tulle for that type of hem.

I serged the seams on the lining but I didn’t want to do that on the taffeta since taffeta is temperamental and things like serging stitches leave permanent marks on the outside of the fabric once the seams are pressed. I did french seams on the taffeta seams which take longer but look really nice. I ended up staying up till midnight the day before my birthday and still not finishing. I could tell though it was time to stop, my machine was throwing a fit and in my fatigued state (I’d been up since 5am that morning and worked a full shift) I decided it would go better if I got some sleep. I was back working on the dress by 7am. I finally finished around noon which was perfect. I was able to grab lunch before heading out for my photoshoot. I seriously wasn’t sure I was going to finish the dress on time but I did it! I was so proud of myself and it was so much fun to go galavanting all through the mountains to get wonderful shots of my beautiful dress.