My First Dress

I took a little break from art-making recently and made a dress.  It's my first time making a human-sized dress, I usually sew for dolls.  To my surprise it's much easier to make human clothes than doll clothes.  The pieces for doll clothes are so small it's very tricky to sew.  Human size is more forgiving, but you definitely need WAY MORE space and material.


I bought this book from Kinokuniya in Seattle.  It's full of fantastic patterns and beautiful images.  I really love the clean and simple aesthetics of Japanese pattern books.  All of the text is in Japanese, but the illustrations are clear enough you can feel your way through.
If you don't have a Kinokuniya close by I highly recommend Pomadour2 on Ebay.  I've bought a few books from them before and they do a good job of scanning sample pages.  You get to look through the book before you buy, it's almost as good as browsing shelves!


This was the dress I chose to make.


This is the result of my first dress. The dress hasn't been hemmed in this picture.  I would probably add 2" to the length in my next attempt.  Overall it was very easy to sew and took about 4 hours.  The only problem I had was getting the collar to lay flat.  Probably a NOOB mistake.


The collar is a bit funky, it sticks out and doesn't lay against the body.  I thought I had cut the trim fabric on the bias, but looking at this picture I think I might have cut it straight!  That would explain it... Fabric cut on the bias is much more flexible and moldable. 
I'm so excited!  Dress making is very addictive... once you make one you want to immediately make another.