laucreates: party dress

party dress

my son loves the smurfs. he loves the films i mean not the cartoons, although i love the cartoons being a child of the 80s and 90s my childhood consisted of a lot of smurfs cartoons. the gargamel evil laugh used to give me chills and for me it was the epitome of all evil. anyhow i was extremely excited when they made the movie. and although it wasn't by any means a harry potter it wasn't an eragon either. both of which i love btw.

so when i was searching smurfs 2 online to show my son the pics and stuff before the movie release i came across the dress katie perry was wearing to the premiere and i fell in love with it. it was whimsy and pretty perfect.

few days ago i was shopping in INA market in delhi where i usually go to get my groceries and my gluten free flour etc although the best place for gluten free flour in new delhi is in defense colony market.

but this place also has saree shops and fabric shops. and it was in one of these shops that i came across the lace i think its called mohan textiles. when i saw this i looked for a lining and they had a cotton crepe cream color which i thought would be great.

this below is the katie perry dress

i have decided to make a dress which has long sleeves like with complete lining but some thing like this sandra bullock dress

basically what i have noticed is lace seen to be very much in at this time
so i started off with two fabrics

how to cut dress
the pdf above shows the pieces have cut. the pictures below show how i did it
as always i used one of my old shirts as pattern

fold the material and along the folded edge keep the dress u are using as a pattern

measure how long you want the top to be and fold this length. fold the sleeves in and cut along leaving atleast a half inch seam allowance

you have cut the front piece. you can cut the neck how ever you want later

to cut the back keep this piece on two open edges as shown maybe an inch away and cut

do the same with the sleeve depending on length you want

mark the middle of sleeve to help you align the overlay as well as fixing the sleeves

cut all pieces out of lace making the sleeves a little longer

for the bottom skirt part i use the top pieces as guide and cut down to the length i wanted as i showed in pdf

stitching with lace is little tricky so the first thing you do if take ur under lining pieces of sleeves and the skirt and hem the edges
then you can use a fabric glue to lightly paste all around the pieces except at the hemmed edge

let the glue dry over night don't use a glue gun

TO DO THE NECK

take a piece of under fabric which covers the neck keep it on the good side

pin if you need to and stitch along the wrong side

cut the inside of the neck and leave one inch at the other side trim this with a zig zag

on the inside make nick carefully up to the stitch

turn over and stitch on the plain fabric this will give the neck stability you can skip this if you have used interfacing on the cloth

this stitch should be smooth on should not come over to front

do a basting stitch on the front you can do a invisible stitch later with hand

do the other sides the same way
now u can do any darts you like

STITCHING THE FRONT AND THE BACK
attach the respective top and bottom pieces of the back of the dress

put the two back pieces with the two lace sides together. then put the zipper down and mark the point where the zipper ends. stitch from about one inch before the end the zipper where i placed the scissors. and stitch from this pint down. also remember to zig zag both the the edges , i forgot to do this which gave me a lot of trouble.

attach the zipper

put the darts at the back

back view

attach the top and bottom of the front piece

attach the shoulders. put the right sides together and attach the shoulders

ATTACHING THE SLEEVES
i always attach the sleeves before doing the sides
i use the middle marking on the sleeve and align it with the shoulder stitch
then stitch from the middle to the arm hole
then repeat again from the middle to down