Last month I had a birthday (um, 29th, of course) so I decided to ‘treat’ myself to a new me-made dress. I put ‘treat’ in quotation marks because somehow I never seem to remember that sewing takes longer than I think it should, and that having a hard deadline — a birthday party starting at 8:30 on the Saturday night on which I was trying to finish the dress — is really NOT such a good idea for avoiding stress and remaining gracefully serene…y’know, like I usually am. 😛

Nonetheless, my alter-ego Sewzilla got this done with minutes to spare, and her tension was soothed with a hard shot of liquor gingerly handed to her by her awesome husband when the hem was finally done. Knock it back, and ready for the party!

I made View A of Vogue 8998, a pattern I was drawn to because of the amazing colour of the dress on the cover. That yellowy-green has got to be my favourite colour of all time. What do you call that, anyway? Chartreuse? Limeade? I’ve had several unfortunate incidents with wall paint in that shade — I’m a deliberately slow learner when it comes to wall paint and that colour — particularly that time I painted the bathroom. It’s hard enough to face the mirror each morning without also having a bonus sickly yellow-green cast on my face. Much better used in clothing!

I made the dress with a fantastic embossed scuba-like fabric I found at Fabricland. Sorry about the grainy pics — it was too damn cold to go outside for better light.

I made a couple of modifications to the pattern: I omitted the zipper since this fabric has great 4-way stretch, and I took away some of the fullness of the skirt by folding a triangular ‘slice’ out of each of the skirt panels, like this:

When I cut the pattern pieces I modified the back bodice to be higher (I was worried I wouldn’t like the low-cut back), but once I put it together I cut the back lower as the pattern calls for and I loooooove the look of it.

My only tiny regret is that I forgot to centre the fabric pattern on the front bodice piece when I was cutting. It’s no big deal, but it would have been a nice touch to have the pattern sitting symmetrically on the front. I made no attempt to line up the pattern otherwise or even ensure it was running in the same direction on the skirt panels. I don’t think it matters with this pattern.

I used just about 1.75 yards of fabric for the dress, which means I have enough left over to try to rip off this cute design by Ted Baker, and save myself about $170. We’ll see…

The dress survived a fun evening at a rock n roll bar with friends mostly intact (the dress, not the friends, although they’re mostly intact, too). I had this ‘great idea’ to take an ‘After’ shot, and use the hundreds of empty liquor bottles we had in the house — we were doing a bottle drive for charity, really! — for a shot of me in the dress lying amongst the scattered bottles passed out. But, I’m afraid you’ll have to use your imagination on that one, as my fear of such a picture making the rounds in my professional circle won out over my desire for an awesome laugh. Maybe I should’ve had a few more drinks. 😉