This dress & I have been having an emotional battle for the past few weeks. I assume it was all one sided on my part, but the feelings were all very real.
If you follow me on Instagram, or read my last post, you’ll know that this isn’t exactly how this dress was supposed to go. It was supposed to have a scrim fabric (the dilapidated barn chic of fabrics) collar, which gave it a completely different vibe for me. I envisioned a dress that you would lurk around abandon cornfields in. This is not that dress.
A flimsy fabric collar needs to lie flat. I forgot to account for that & change the collar & neckline patterns to accommodate the change. And it did not go well at all. And so began my mental struggle.
I have a huge struggle with perfectionism; I’ve probably mentioned it before. It’s all well & good to have a high standard of excellency, but mine gets out of control extremely quickly as I have a tendency to base my self worth on how “perfect” I do things that I want to be “perfect” at. And I really really get down on myself when I so called fail.
When this dress didn’t go how I wanted, my first reaction was to dramatically throw it out the window, give up on everything & wonder why I even bother to try. Or at the very least, put it away in a box & try & move on from it even though it would be lurking in the back of my mind forever, taunting me about my inadequacies.
But if you also have followed me on Instagram for a long time, you’ll know that my first born dog, Punchy, was attacked & almost killed 12-26-14. A very long story short, it led to me actually following through on things, anything, for the first time in my life.
So I took that lesson & brought it to this particular project. This is all very dramatic for a dress haha, but, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m much more the visionary/artist type & each thing I make is much more than just a piece of clothing to me.
Now back to the actual dress. The body/sleeves are a super lightweight cotton batiste & I was very hesitant to do a solid white collar because I thought it would make it too heavy looking. It’s made out of Kona cotton, two layers with a super lightweight interfacing between. I sewed the seam on the outside (as in already right side out) then attached the trim (which is vintage) along the stitch line, then carefully trimmed off the seam allowance from underneath.
As I went along I was very surprised to see that the white collar didn’t weigh the dress down at all. It actually reminded me of a fancy old porcelain cake scooper that my grandma had and ended up adding this amazing delicateness that I was starting to get really excited about.
I tried to hold myself in check, as I still had the sleeves to do which were also a total crapshoot/experiment. None of the seams (save the hem) are even finished on the inside because I was mentally fragile & not looking to invest the time so I could just get it done already.
The sleeves are an altered version of view C in Simplicity D0823, which is a reproduction pattern of a variety of fancy (I believe 1930s) sleeves.
The sleeves to make weren’t difficult as much as they were just a lot more involved, shall we say, than a regular old sleeve. Attaching them however was a whole can of torture for me. And it’s truly only because I didn’t cut my dress bodice top to match up with the one in the pattern. Not did I bother to transfer the placement lines around my armholes either. Also having a 20 year old dress form that has seen way better days & just randomly starts ghost drifting to one side while you’re trying to pin something didn’t help either. But the thing technically still functions so I’d rather spend the money on fabric, ya know?
Collar on, sleeves on & I’m suddenly coming to the realization that this could possibly be my favorite thing I’ve ever made. Seriously. It has that quintessential Live Through This Courtney Love vibe, but then it’s also just so puritanical witchy spooky too. Like, this dress could not be more representative of me. Pretty cool & pretty crazy, right? I wanted to totally give up on it at one point. But I guess that couldn’t be more representative of me either.
Thanks for reading! I hope you find some inspiration, either wordy wise or even just visually.