Simple ‘hot-pink’ dress (Butterick 5032)

Another dress (I should have called this blog ‘another dress’ hehe). I  wanted a bright dress that would go with many different necklaces.

Fact: A pout is not such a good look on me haha

I just came back from a trip out with my mum in which we had lunch and went fabric shopping. The Remnant Warehouse has a buy-one-roll-and get-one free sale on its off-cut fabric rolls and lets just say money was spent and awesome fabric chaos ensued. Most of the fabric I got was as low as $3 per meter, SCORE!

I used Butterick 5032 again (my first Butterick 5032 dress is here), but this time rather than adding the fitted skirt it came with added a gathered dirndl skirt instead.

There comes a time in every sewists life where they are relieved to have completed a flawless invisible zipper installation.

The zip is perfectly encased/between the lining and the fashion fabric and you are ready for to try it on…then the zip gets stuck.

You gently tug a few times until the tugging becomes not-so-gentle and  of the more the anxious variety then BAM the zip goes off it’s tracks, the more you panic the worse it gets till there is a tear in the zipper so it’s back to square one.

The sheer frustration/annoyance! You look up towards sky with your arms up and if there was a camera above you it would be panning out as you scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Time to kill another 40+ minutes and put a new zip in just when you thought you were done.

Ah well…live and learn.

I have a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the zip itself.

I know what you are thinking ‘a bad tradesman blames his tools’ but this was a brand I don’t normally use and it was pre-packaged (blah so pointless and wasteful) and when you take the zip out of the stupid plastic packaging there were bends/kinks in it.

Of course I was sort of lazy and blasé about the original zipper and thought ‘ironing an invisible zips is for suckers’ well lets just say I was very happy that I ironed the second zip that was also deformed due to unnecessary packaging, because it was hard to zip up and down fresh out of the plastic too!

I am not entirely happy with the fit of this dress for a number of reasons. Especially the back.

Originally I was going to remove 2cms gaping fabric the front neckline from this pattern by putting the excess fabric in the dart which I did a tutorial for here, but I ended up going with 7mm on each side but  now I wish I removed more.

The back is crazy. I thought I could use the same technique I mentioned aboce for removing gaping at the the back, which turned out to be completely ridiculous because the gave me excess fabric in the middle of my back. Why did I think that would work? Happily I don’t have breasts on my back, but that would be the only way that alteration would have worked. I ended up having to lengthen the back darts.

It I ever make this dress again I will change the darts to pannel lines (in the back of the dress) and remove 2cms from each side of the newly created panel lines.

Also its probably wise to remove the same amount from the front and back of the necklines.

You learn so much through error with this fitting business!

I really like the idea of having lots of articles of clothing in strong bright solid colours (no patterns) so I can have fun with my ever expanding collection of accessories.

I usually go above the knee on dresses and skirts put I sort of liked the more demure length. Even the boyfriend said he liked the longer skirt he mentioned that it worked because of my shorter hair. I guess I can always shorten it, but at the moment I like it.

It’s good to get an opinion from a partner. Once I made this very high-waisted skirt with a very big repeating pattern, when I tried it on I thought something was awry and he told me very tactfully that it was not a good look, yay for nice yet honest style advice!

As for the dart positioning on the front of the bodice and the fact that the bust darts are so big due to the pattern alteration…I don’t even want to think about it right now…

I wish I could move past the fit because there is a lot I like about this dress. I just have to tell myself that if I bought it RTW I would not be as fussy and that a little bit of excess fabric is not the end of the world.