Ta-da!!

Or as E would say, "Duh-daaaaa!" My first real homesewn dress!! I'm so proud of myself. Although to be technical, it's actually my second effort at sewing a dress. The first one...well, let's just say it didn't turn out quite like I'd hoped. But I'll get to that later. Let's start with the good, shall we?

So you may recall that I recently made this dress and this dress from material that was already pre-shirred (for all you non-sewing types, that means it was already all gathered up and elasticized). It was super easy, and I really wanted to make more, but there's a pretty slim selection of fabric, especially fabric that isn't 4 feet long, meaning that I'd be wasting about half of it. Not to mention that depending on where you buy it, it's not exactly cheap. And almost everything I found was a 65/35 - poly/cotton blend - which I personally don't care for. I couldn't find any that was 100% cotton.

Then I happened across this fabulous tutorial on how to do the shirring myself! Aha! So I headed over to my local fabric store (conveniently located about 5 minutes from my house) and found some super cute, summery cotton seersucker on sale and decided to give it a whirl. It actually was not all that hard to do. But it was pretty time-consuming.

So here's a pic of E in the dress - I pulled it on over her jammies this morning. Hee. I'm really quite proud of how it turned out. I'm even thinking about making a matching top for myself. Or maybe not. But I do love the fabric. Having a pattern with lines to follow made sewing with the elastic thread a LOT easier.

Back to my real first dress effort. Well...this is what I get for trying to sew something that not only have I never ever done before, but also to do it without a real pattern. I've been wanting to do a pillowcase dress for a while now, but the pillowcase shape is a bit boring to me. A friend of mine made one that she modified by making into more of a real dress with a gathered skirt. I also saw some cute halter dresses on Etsy that didn't look too hard. You can see where this is headed.

So I worked it out in my head, cut out a paper pattern first, and then just went for it. It's actually not totally terrible, and it looks way better laid out on the table than it does on, but I think my overall construction method was a bit flawed. I realize now that I did some steps backwards, so the top part is too big, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to fix it without taking the whole dang thing apart.

Here's some pics of when I tried it on E yesterday (again, over jammies):


From the front, it looks a lot like just a kitchen apron. But I think the back turned out pretty well, all things considered. My first try using elastic. I take some comfort in the fact that I knew this was an experiment and used pretty much the cheapest fabric I had lying around (a $2 remnant from Ikea). I think the next one will be better.