I’ll admit it — I love shopping for new things to wear.
Clothes, shoes, bags, jewelry, you name it, and I love to siftthrough sales racks to find them. One problem with this is that I don’t have a lot of excess money to spend on these shopping sprees, and often a choice has to be made — the dress or the shoes? Luckily, the choice can be made easier by the fact that I know I can sew a comparable dress for less than the sticker price at Target.
I decided to make a dress to wear for my cousin’s confirmation this weekend. I wanted something cool and springy, and I had the perfect pattern: a short sleeved fit-and-flare dress with a cute notched neckline from Simplicity’s Project Runway collection. For fabric, I used a cream-colored designer quilting cotton with a teal pattern.(Is it a feather? Fern? Leaf? I’m not sure, but it is pretty.)
Total spent? Only $12 so far.
First thing before I make a dress out of a pattern I’ve never used before, is make a muslin, or a test garment out of cheap fabric (I already had some on hand). I usually only make a muslin for the bodice, since skirts really don’t need precise fitting. This helps to find flaws in the pattern and show what alterations must be made; I saw that I needed to take in a few seams and lengthen the waist.
Next, I cut the fabric. Typically, if something goes wrong for me, this is where, and the notched-neck dress was no exception. I forgot I wanted to lengthen the waist, and almost ran out of fabric for the skirt. Thankfully, the skirt was gathered, so less fabric would only mean it’s a little less full.
Now, I gathered the skirt pieces by running a loose whipstitch by hand through the tops of the skirt pieces and pulled the thread gently to pucker the fabric. I pinned the bodice pieces to the skirt pieces and began sewing. Always read the instructions that come with the pattern to see what order to sew them together: some require sewing shoulders first; some skirts to bodice first, some bodice to other bodice pieces first.
The actual sewing went off without a hitch, and I got to use my new favorite trick for sewing the hem: stay stitching, where you sew a straight line around the hem about an inch above the edge and then fold the fabric over and stitch in place. The straight line causes the fabric below it to pucker ever so slightly, just enough to ease in a hem with a nice swingy finish.
How did it turn out? With the price of the pattern and zipper included, the dress cost me about $15, less than the $40 that is typical of similar styles out in stores. I wore it with a teal faux snakeskin belt on clearance at Target for $3.89 and pale beige heels from Payless. In this purchasing battle of dress vs. shoes, because of some simple sewing tricks, I was able to confidently choose shoes.
