Christmas Dress

This is what I wore for Christmas Mass 2018!  :-)   The dress is out of a plaid silk and the jacket is out of black cotton velor.  The jacket closed well but it turned out the bodice of the dress was a bit too big and closing the jacket meant the neckline of the dress bunched up.   So...open jacket it is!

Patterns:


McCall's M6953 - The dress pattern
McCall's M7315  - The base to make the bolero

Dress:

The only real changes I made to the pattern were to make the bodice an inch longer and make the skirt a bit fuller.   Other than that, the pattern is pretty much exactly the same.   I'm glad I made the bodice longer - it's a bit short and I could have probably gotten away with an inch and a half.   I wanted a full skirt because I have a lovely black petticoat to go with the dress. 

The dress is made out of silk I got from Fabric Mart a few months ago.   It was on sale for $9.99 a yard.   It was sold as dupioni, I think, but it's really more of a shantung.   The bodice is lined in striped white cotton and interlined in duck.  I didn't bother reading the directions - the pattern pieces are all pretty basic- so I don't know if the pattern calls for an interlining or not.  However, if you do make this pattern, having the interlining in a heavier material helps a lot.  The only notion I used for the dress was a 22" long black invisible zipper.

Bolero:

I wanted black velvet but the cotton velor was on sale so...cotton velor it is!  I used the dress pattern M7315 as a base because I loved the side dart and I am terrible at drafting side darts.  However, the pattern proved to be nothing but trouble.  I knew something was wrong when I looked at the sleeve.  The sleeve pattern for M7315 for a size 12 (I went up from my normal size because jacket) is only 14" across at it's widest point.  That's including the seam allowance.   Ummm.....

Yeah.  No.   My bicep is about 17" snuggly.  The shoulder (ie, going around the armpit and over the shoulder) is 19"~.  There was no way the sleeve would fit.  Still, I was curious if they meant this to be an off the shoulder number or something else was going on. 

The first mock up looked abysmal.  I couldn't fit it past the "end of the t-shirt sleeve" length on my arms.  I took the sleeve off figuring something like that would happen and marked the mock up with a new armsyce (it was a good inch and a half off).   The mock up already had the curved front and the solid back that should have worked.   It did but it was just a bit too short.

Once I made all the changes, I tried a new mock up and it looked like it would work.  However, I didn't try it over the finished dress.   Turns out that the neckline of the bolero would be too tight over the dress and cause a bunch of bunching.   I ended up leaving the bolero unhooked like in the photo.

The bolero is lined in what I think is a poly blend satin lining...thing?   It was €3 a meter at the thrift store and I think it was one of the Ralph Lauren fabrics so I didn't ask too many questions.  It's lining. 

Anyway, that was the last project of 2018!   Hopefully, I'll sew a lot more in 2019 now that the sewing room is pretty much finished.