Let’s treat this dress like a cautionary tale, the story of what happens when you use terrible fabric and rush the sewing. I should know better than this by now, right? You’d think so, but clearly I don’t. Blargh.

I started this dress way back on April 19th for Stitch Odyssey’s vintage pledge. Oh man, I had such solid intentions here. Visions of a lovely tiki dress, margarita sippin’. PLANS WERE MADE.

Plans went awry. My first mistake was in my fabric choice, as it so often is. This fabric came from the clearance section at Joann’s some time ago, and is of dubious quality. Coarse and stiff, with little to now give. It’s a rather wide fabric, I didn’t measure it, but definitely wider than anything I’ve worked with before. Here you can see that it’s a double sided border print, the same on both ends. The print is kinda wild, and I REALLY thought I’d done an okay job pattern matching. Folks, that’s clearly not the case 🙁

My second mistake was with the pattern. This is a vintage pattern I purchased here, on a vintage pattern buying spree. What can I say, I’m really into the 70’s look lately. The thing with vintage patterns, though, is that sometimes you have to grade them. It can be a little impossible to get the exact size you need. Well, I decided to cut this one late night, and guess what I forgot to do? That’s right, grade the pattern. I didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late, so I had to add little “expansion triangles” at the side seams to make it fit. This pattern needs to fit just so, and the unforgiving fabric just wasn’t cooperating, so we have weird creasing at the underbust facing. WHATEVER MAN. I managed to finish the dress and learned some lessons. That’s good enough for me! Here’s to hoping for more success with my next project, another vintage Etsy find, Vogue 8181. Happy sewing 🙂

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