Summer Dress
Kesämekko
Idea and materials
One weekend a friend of mine came over to sew a dress for herself. She had the magazine with the pattern with her (Suuri Käsityö 7/2010) and I saw a nice looking, but somewhat complicated summer dress (Olkainmekko) there.
I had bought quite a lot of green cotton facric few years before (and tried to make a skirt out of it, but that was never finished). I took a tiny piece of it with me and went to Eurokangas in Tullintori. I found a fabric with some ballet dancers on white background, the dancers are in green and black and the green matches perfectly.
The two fabrics.
Pattern and cutting the pieces
The dress is somewhat complicated and has a lot of pieces.
Patterns for the summer dress
There is two of pretty much everything, one piece actually had to be cut as many as eight times.
All the back side and front side parts.
Sewing
I actually did the sewing twice, first I used a stitch that finishes the edges of the fabric at the same time. Unfortunately I had added seam allowance according to the instructions in the magazine, and the seam was too close to the edge, making the dress too large. I had to sew another seam a bit further away from the edge.
Most of the parts sewn together.
More of the front side sewn together.
When I had finished sewing the front and back parts together, I noticed the shoulder straps goes in a angle that doesn't really fit me at all. While the dress seems to be correct size otherwise, I have yet to decide what to do about the straps, and the dress remains unfinished.
Plenty of time until next summer anyway. x)
July 14th 2012: next summer has been here for some time... I actually did do changes already last year, first fixing the odd angles of the shoulder straps. After that I still wasn't quite satisfied how the dress looked on me. The issue is quite simply that empire dresses do not fit my body type. I am pretty clueless about what dresses fit what type and what type I am anyway, so this did not occur to me at all before starting. What I did not like was how the green strip under the breasts emphasized them, so I took that out first. Then I realized that the dress started widening right after the breast too, which totally hides my waist. Not flattering at all. So I pretty much took it appart last year but did not put it back together and it has been like that for quite some time.
I got a party coming up where I might want to wear this dress, so I am back to continuing it. Since it was in pieces, I first just pinned it together and tested if it would look better continuing in a straight line about 10cm below the breasts, instead of widening right away. It actually does. So now I just need to sew everything back together like that. :)
I kept the hem width the same, so where I had to take in to keep the straight line after breasts, I then widened more from the upper corner of the green triangles towards the bottom.
July 15th: Zigzagged the edges to keep them from unravelling, turned the hem and adjusted the shoulder traps once more when everything else was done. All done now. :)
Finished summer dress. Hard to see in this picture, but it comes to bit below my knees. Longer than in the the magazine's picture, but what can you expect when the model is probably 20-30cm longer than me... Changing the dress from empire to.. um, something non-empire, also makes it look different, at least when I am wearing it.
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