Much much earlier in the year, I decided I wanted to make a replica of a Princess Highway dress that I love to wear. I'd already made replicas of a skirt, which I feel was very successful, since I was able to reuse it to make my Mary Poppins skirt for Book Week last year, so I was pretty confident that I could replicate this dress.
I'm fairly sure I did a mock up of the bodice in leftover sheet fabric, and then turned my attention to some Japanese fabric I had in my stash. It was a lovely cherry blossom print, and there were meters and meters of it. I thought it would look really lovely, so I lay it out and got started.
Then I found out it was very sheer. I hadn't noticed before because it had come folded over, into what would be a good width for kimono making, but when I unfolded it, I discovered it's true see-through nature. Totally fine, I rationalize, I'll just line it. I've got loads of lovely cotton bedsheets that will work perfectly. So I cut the bodice and everything is going smoothly, before I remember, now the skirt has to be lined, my pocket construction won't work the way it was supposed to. Sigh. So I've got to rethink all of that.
The other thing I've got to rethink entirely, is how to cut the skirt out. The fabric is only about 60cm across, which is pretty narrow. One width, won't be enough for a front panel of the skirt. Two is a bit much, but doable, except it lands me with a centre front seam, which I don't think I can stand. I did sew it with the centre seam initially and it did turn out I hated it. So then I unpicked it all, and cut one of them into two and sewed them either side of the front (is this making sense to anyone?).
The skirt of the dress was definitely much fuller than it needed to be, but the fabric was so sheer and I was using the selvage edges for the skirt, sides, rather than have to deal with firstly working out by how much smaller to make each panel and then spend twice as long on each seam because I would have had to French Seam them to make them sturdy and beautiful.
It turned out that I had also cut the skirt panels excessively long, and the hem on them was turning out to be ginormous. At this point, I was so over this dress. What I had thought was going to be a beautiful, flowing easy to wear dress, was turning out to be a layered, bulky monstrosity. Not sure it would ever recover, I put it on the dress form and tried adding belts to see if that helped things.
. It did. A bit. So after another week or so of procrastination, I just finished the hem and called it done.
I've honestly been having a rough year in my mind, and this sewing experience did not help things. Even though I've since made other, much more successful projects, I'm still not feeling all there. I did wear the dress twice before the weather got too cold, in an attempt to move past the somewhat disastrous sewing experience. But I was not feeling like I would reach for it too quickly when the weather changed.
What I did do, after a sewing break and a palette cleanser, was use the pattern, and all I'd learned from making it, to make another dress. This time out of a (non-sheer) cotton that mum picked up on sale at Spotlight.
This dress worked exactly as I had wanted. This dress fit so well, sewed without having to rethink or unpick anything. This dress looks beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, because I did do French Seams on the sides and finished the other edges with bias binding. This dress has pockets to write home about and is exactly what I need to wear for a great day.
I listened to a sewing podcast recently which talked about taking the time to reclaim the items that you didn't have the best experience making. Make new memories with that item, so you can move past the bad ones and still enjoy it.
I guess I don't often have too many bad sewing experiences, or items that I'm so frustrated with that I can't bring myself to wear. The last one I can remember was this dragonfly dress, which wasn't a terrible experience so much as turning out to be not my style of dress after all. Maybe it was time, but listening to the podcast did make me consider the cherry blossom dress again. I should give it another go.
After all, I'm the only one who knows about the sewing grief I experienced, and I don't need to let it stop me wearing it. Also, it did pave the way for a dress I do truly love, so it can't be all that bad, right?
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