The Franken-Dress Finished

Here it is!  And I love it, pretty much as I expected to.  Light and airy, I can wear it with ballet flats, sandals, and I even tried it with my Steampunk airship boots (but I don't think that'll fly, so to speak).  I wore it all day Saturday on an extensive shopping venture and didn't trip even once on the points while walking up stairs--a personal best  :-)






So here's the details:
Having never worked with fabric quite like this one, I thought it prudent to do a bit of testing first.  When I bought this last summer from Fabric.com I wasn't sure what it was destined to be, and it was on sale for $1.99, so I got 6 yards.  Plenty for experimenting.

The skirt would be easy.  It's the tank top that was going to give me trouble and I knew that from the outset.

The top pattern is Kwik Sew 2517-- it's a dress pattern that I have used before for tops. I decided I really liked the look of View C, sans the mock turtle neck, so I simply redrafted the front to have a scoop neckline.  That left me with no clear guide on how long the neckline binding strips should be, so Sample Tank Top Number 1 was primarily intended to give me a feel for sewing this fabric and help me to determine 1) how long the bindings should be, 2) how much I need to stretch the bindings to make sure the necklines and armholes don't gape open, and 3) how easy it would be to sew those bitty 1/4" bindings in this very crinkly fabric that wants to curl at the edges anyway.  Sample Tank Top Number 1 isn't wearable, but it did answer all those questions.

Sample Tank Top Number 2 turned out perfect, I thought--until I realized that I didn't center the medallion motif properly  *sigh*  That was a major disappointment, because I really liked the effect of the pattern placement with the teal bindings.  I put a rolled hem on this and decided to wear it as a plain tank top--chances are that no one but me is going to notice it isn't centered.

This is where I started getting a little frustrated.  I cannot bear to waste things, especially fabric.  And I particularly love this crinkly stuff.  My only gripe with this fabric is that the repeat is so long, so that there would be a lot of wasted fabric if you're looking to use the colors and patterns as design elements.  I was going to have to lose about 1/2 to 3/4 quarters of a yard to recut another tank top so that I could replicate the pattern placement of Sample Tank Top Number 2.  I gritted me teeth, laid out the fabric, gathered my cutting tools...and discovered I couldn't do it.  I just couldn't bring myself to cut a tank top out of the middle of a piece of fabric.  So I rearranged the pattern pieces for less waste, even though it meant the blues in the fabric weren't going to be where I originally thought I wanted them.

Once I had the tank top finished,  the skirt was pretty quick.  Kwik Sew 3242 has both a skirt and a top pattern--I've tried the top and I did not like the fit at all.  The skirt I like--even though Kwik Sew's pattern envelope makes it look kind of stiff and, I don't know, sort of dumpy-looking (the drawing is great, the picture *shudder* is awful).  The skirt pattern is drafted for a woven instead of  a knit, so the tricky part was making sure that I didn't trace the wrong size and end up with more skirt than I could stuff into the tank top waist seam.  What made it easier was that the pattern is such that the handkerchief part is attached to a yoke.  I measured the bottom edge of the tank top, compared it with the bottom edge of the yoke pattern piece and traced out the corresponding handkerchief piece of the correct size.  I did end up having to shorten it just a bit, though, since my fabric wasn't quite wide enough to handle the whole pattern piece.  Stitching it to the tank top was a piece of cake.

What I didn't take into account is what all that fabric (and there is alot!) hanging from the waist would do to the tank top.  *sigh again*  The waist seam was pulled down too close to the hip line (not a good thing for me) and the armholes were pulled a little further down than I liked.  There's nothing (easy!) I can do about the armholes and it's not so bad that it's unwearable, but I did unpick the waist seam *more sighs since unpicking a serged seam is not exactly fun*, cut off about 2 inches from the tank top, and reattached the skirt.  That worked out nicely.  I used a rolled hem on the serger for the skirt hem.  I paired it with my leaves and butterfly necklace and black ballet flats (brown probably would have been better, but I don't have brown ballet flats *sadface* ) and went shopping  :-)

I think this dress needs a belt or a sash or something to make it look totally put-together and complete.  I'll have to think about it.

All told, this project took about 3 yards worth of 48 inch wide fabric--not including the yard I used for practice--so I still have two yards left...hmmm, I'll have to think about what I can do with those...