Gatsby dress

Remember the June Challenge?  No?  Oh yeah, that's because it ended 4 months ago.  I'm finally getting around to posting the last dress that I made for the challenge.  Hello, my name is lazy.

This was supposed to be a super easy dress.  It was based off of a Forever 21 dress that I bought in April.  The original dress fit like a glove and was perfect in every way, except for being scant inches short of immodesty.  Forever 21 must use midgets to draft their patterns on.  Their dresses are just never long enough.

I laid the forever 21 dress out on top of newspaper, and carefully traced the pieces out, and added seam allowances and everything.  I had bought navy blue mystery fabric from the Fabric Discount Outlet in Pilsen, and I used almost all of it for this dress.  The fabric is great; it's very light and drapey, and has polkadots worked into the fabric.  I don't know what the technical term for that is.  It's like the popcorn stitch in knitting, but smaller and woven.  Anyway, it's pretty.

Once the pieces were cut out, piecing them together went relatively quickly.  I decided I should probably try it on before I put the zipper in and hemmed it.  Um, problem.  There was an itty bitty tiny (4 inch) gap in the back.  Well, poop.  Luckily I had enough scrap fabric to be able to put 2 inch panels on either side of the back.  Of course, they don't match the waistband, and they taper off into the skirt, which means that the back bunches strangely around my butt.

Crisis averted.  I put the zipper in, and everything appears to be going well.  I step into the dress...and it won't go over my hips.  No problem. I'll just put it over my head.  It won't go over my chest.  What do you know, I'm a girl after all.  The zipper was too short, and ended about an inch above the smallest part of the waist of the dress.  Instead of going out and buying a new zipper, I just ripped it out and undid some of the back seam and scooted it down a few inches, then sewed the top of the dress together again, by hand.  Now it's still pretty tight over my head, but it's doable.  I just need to remember to not put deodorant on until  after I put the dress on, otherwise disaster ensues.

Aside from the frustration involved in making this fit, I'm really happy with it.  It fits and has a nice, classic feel to it.  Plus, it matches the cover of my copy of The Great Gatsby, which I read for the first time while I was making this.  (I rescued the book from my brother's trash pile.  He supposedly read it in english class, and thought it wasn't worth saving.  Blasphemy.  Books are never trash).  I kind of loved the book, which is why it took so long to get these pictures up.  I had an idea in mind of what I wanted them to look like, and they involved my pretty book.

This weekend I made another dress using the same pattern that I drafted for this dress, plus some alteration.  Maybe I'll post that one before January.  Maybe.