My 1st Dress

A while back I got some patterns from the store. I had this really cute dress pattern that I had wanted to make. Well, I had a baby between now and then and I wasn't ready to make a dress until I was thin enough to wear it. When my mom was in town during Dec she bought me the material I wanted for my pattern. OK, pressure on: I had to make it, it had to fit, and my mom wanted to see a picture of me in it so it had to be good enough to actually wear, not just fit. I had enough projects for Christmas so this was on the list for the new year.

I would like to report that I did it :). This is my first dress I have made for myself... well, finished anyway.

It's hard to tell how hard the pattern was (Simplicity, ya right!) because of the dress material. I'll try to show some of the tricky parts:

Here is the collar. My first collar. I was prepared to learn this part and figured this might be the hardest part of the dress. It's kind of a bad picture, but it also has a v neck line which I wanted to look nice too.

This is a picture of the side zipper. It's kind of at an angle since I was taking the picture :). This was another thing I had never done. Back zippers aren't that bad, but I didn't know how much harder it would be doing it on the side. I survived, and the zipper works!

The last thing that was tricky about this dress was the skirt. I didn't realize when I got the pattern that the skirt has 8 gores, or triangle inserts, to sew! I had to line them up and be sure there was no puckering when it was all sewn. The last thing I did was serge the seams. There are a lot of seams in the skirt and if I didn't serge it they would eventually unravel, ruining all of my work! I think I need to invest in my own serger - Thanks Amanda for letting me use yours!

I took the picture of the skirt inside out so you could get a feel for how the triangles look. It's a really full skirt though. I used almost all 6 yards of material for this dress! I like twirly skirts ;)

Overall, I learned a lot, and I ended up with a new church dress too! Thanks Mom for the material and believing that I could do it! Jeff even likes the dress - that's always a bonus :). Now, what to do when I lose more weight and the dress doesn't fit?

OK, and just because I couldn't do a post about my dress and not show other cute pictures:

Clark likes to reach, and really likes the computer. It's always funny to see babies act like they know how to use technology!