Wedding dress done!

Yay! The summer wedding dress is finally complete. I finished off the last of the hemming tonight... I nearly finished last night, but I was tired and afraid of messing it up in the final step and being really annoyed later. So, I saved it for tonight and it went pretty smoothly, although I did make one tiny little nick in the chiffon when I was trimming it to make the baby hem. I really need to get some duckbill scissors at some point, because I find myself doing baby hems a lot these days. My Pfaff also has a rolled hem foot that probably would have worked well for doing this, but I haven't taken the time to figure out how to use it yet and I didn't want to mess up on this dress.

I'll get my SO to take some nice pictures of me soon, but for now here's a grainy mirror shot on me. The sewing dummy doesn't fill it out very well, so it's not a fair impression! The fit turned out really well despite the fact that I didn't make a muslin, and it has great coverage so I can wear it with my normal bras.

I made a straight size 10 in this pattern, with very few alterations. As you can see I had no problems with the shoulders and the bust, which are normally big problem areas for me fit wise. The gathers over the bust in this pattern make it easy to squeeze a few extra inches of cleavage in there with no fit problems -- It's probably just a little less gathered on me than on someone who's closer to the envelope measurements. The waist turned out true to the size on the envelope, unfortunately for me in this case. The pattern promised a finished waist of 31.5 inches, and since my waist is closer to 32 inches this was a bit tight. To get more room in the waist, I modified the pattern by taking out one set of darts in the back (there are four back darts in the pattern), which gave me about an extra inch in the waist. I made a pintuck along the line where the darts should have been to preserve the lines of the pattern. An easy fix without any redrafting!

Another small modification that I made was to underline the back panel with lining fabric, both to make it easier to make the darts and because the chiffon was so sheer that it would have made for an ugly seam at the back waistline. The pattern calls for lining and underlining the front waist and collar pieces, so I'm not sure why it doesn't suggest you do the same for the back as well. I also cut an extra inch off the hem to make it a just above the knee length. I'm pretty short, though, so if you're tall and making up this pattern you might want to add a couple inches just in case!

Phew! Okay, that's all for now. I've typed enough for tonight. I'll get my SO to take those pics, and I'll let the pictures do the talking for the next post!