Sewing a floral sweetheart dress - Part 2

hello everybody,

so this is the second part of making the sweetheart dress. and I´ll talking about making the skirt and finishing the dress.

First, like always, I needed to calculate the pieces of fabric.

Since the bodice as two seams down the center I wanted them go over into the skirt ( if you would cut the whole skirt out of one piece of fabric, this isn´t necessary, but since I had a pattern with a direction, I needed to look at the seams)

So I measured at my bodice from seam to seam, then I had 4 numbers and mulitplied each by 2,5

These are the widths of each piece, the length was in my case 60 cm, but I shortened it later on

 

 

Here are all the 4 pieces:

 

 

Then I finished all the raw edges vertically with a zic-zac stitch, since I don´t have a serger, you could also do this later, but I like to finsh the edges first.

 

 

 In the next step I connected all the pieces together so I had this long strip of fabric with 3 seams.
altogether I had two thin pieces, one wider front piece and one, which was rather long for the back ( the zipper will be on  the side)

 

Then it was time ruffling the top ofthe skirt, this is a process I enyod normally, but since this fabric is so stiff I couldn´t gather it with normal thread, so I had to redo the complete stiching and I also had to go with larger ruffles, which were more or less cartridge pleats.

In the end I used heavy duty thread and stitches that were 1 cm apart from each other.

 

 

Then I gathered it down, by making a knot on one side of the thread, and pulling on the side, till it fitted to the bodice.

 

 I evenly distributed the pleats so that each seam of the bodice goes over into the seam of the skirt, I took a lot of time for is, because I am a perfectionist

 

Sewing the pleats was a tough task for me and my maschine, because like I said before, the fabric is really thick.

 

I finished the wiastline as usual with some bias tape, which I made out of the lining fabric. First I cut three strips, so that they match my waist circumference.

 

 The strips get sewn toegther so I have one long strip, with my bias tape maker i ironed the strips

 The last step was to sew in the zipper, I would have used an invisible one, but my local fabric store didn´t had one.

 

  I hate sewing in the zipper and I am pretty miserable at it too, but with my new sewing maschine the task was bit easier, so it isn´t as bad as some others I made.

with the Zipper done, all that  is left to do is hemming the skirt, but I was a bit in a rush so I didn´t  photograph it.

And here are two photos of me wearing the finished dress

 

 

thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it :)