Orange bridesmaid's dress for Vanessa's wedding

Hello everybody!

I made myself a whole dress! And wore it as my bridesmaid's dress for my sister's wedding. I am so proud of this.

Top pic is a screenshot from a video by Laura Rodder. Don't tap it, it won't play. 

I followed this pattern: The Gala Gown by Patterns for Pirates. 

The pattern has lots of options, I chose to do capped sleeves, the lower neckline option, the floor-length skirt, the pockets and the side split in the skirt. 

The lace overlay was not part of the pattern, but was something I really wanted to add. I watched a YouTube video from the pattern company, that suggested for an overlay you should put the two pieces one on top of the other, and treat them as one piece. This made a lot of sense to me, however the front bodice is made of three pieces, and I didn't really want to piece the lace. On examining the pattern pieces I noticed the lining was not pieced, so I used the front lining as my pattern for the lace.

I stitched the front and back bodice parts together as below. 

And then added in the lace when I joined front to back. 

I then continued with the pattern as normal, adding in the lining. The lace worked perfectly doing it like this. 

The other thing I changed slightly from the pattern was the sleeves. I went with the capped sleeve option and chose to make them out of the lace. Once I had added them I noticed two problems. Firstly that using a see-through material like lace meant that the joining seam showed. And with it having 4 layers of stretch fabrics, there was no way way pressing was going to sort that. The second was that while the instructions said to turn an edge under to hem the sleeve, not only would that show and look messy, but thanks to my pretty appalling cutting out skills, I barely had enough fabric to turn under. You can just about see the problems in these two pics.

Following consultation with my mother and YouTube, it was clear that a rolled hem would sort the second of these problems. So that's what I did. Not the neatest rolled hem in the world, but I am happy with it. In fact, I definitely recommend rolled hems to anyone doing the capped sleeve option (or the longer sleeve options with a sheer fabric). Even with better cutting skills than mine, the amount of fabric at the underside of the capped sleeve is not generous and would be very awkward to turn over. 

While I was doing this, I pinned the seam out the way so I didn't catch it in the hem, and seeing the way that looked made me decide to stitch the hem away from the sleeve. I did this by hand, just tacking the seam to lining. 

I had thought that might feel a little awkward on my shoulders but I didn't notice it all when the dress was one. 

The bodice was the only part where I had issues with fit. I chose to do the lower neckline option, and frankly it showed too much, and the fabric didn't hold the V shape nicely once on my body. I had a good-fitting plunge bra (that matched my lining fabric nicely) to wear underneath it, and I do have the body confidence to deliberately choose to make a very low cut top, but this kept falling wider open and exposing too much of my bra, as you can see in this slightly windy selfie. 

I think this could have been helped making the top a size or even two smaller, but I was reluctant to do this as I generally need the width in the shoulders and the length in the torso. I also think top stitching the neckline might have helped it to look neater, keep the V-shape and not expose so much of the lining. 

The skirt came together very easily.

I did have one pocket that came out looking a bit awkward. I really can't work out what I did wrong, or even what I did differently to the pocket on the other side. I undid and redid it and that improved the appearance slightly but didn't help me to work out the issue. It doesn't really show once the dress is on, so I decided to live with it. And the pockets are a lovely big size, easily big enough for me to not need to carry a handbag at all, without affecting the silhouette of the dress. That felt incredibly liberating, I really need to get around to altering more of my clothes to have pockets. 

The only bit of the skirt I think I should have done differently is the hem. I should have taken it up quite a bit higher, maybe another three inches or so, because I knew I was going to have to manage lots of stairs and running after my small children, and that's a lot easier when not tripping over a dress. But that was purely my own choice and not the fault of the pattern.

So here it is all together! 

As a whole, the pattern was fairly easy to follow. There are some areas that I think could use some improvement though.

The job that took the longest was sellotaping the pattern pieces together. I went with the A4 option, as that's the only printer I own, and there were a lot of pieces of paper to tape together, especially as I was doing the full length skirt option. I don't know quite how this stage could be improved in a PDF pattern though, except that there was no guidance on how to do this and some indication on how much space the pattern would take up taped together would have been nice (yes you could work it out by adding up all the pages, but it would be nice not to have to). 

I also found cutting out the pieces awkward. The diagram showed all the pieces laid out on a rectangle. To have actually done that lay out, I would have needed to make second copies of some of the pieces (which I wasn't going to do after taping all that amount together) and I don't have a surface big enough to spread out that big a piece of fabric flat enough to lay put all the pieces nicely. So I had to improvise a bit and my pieces didn't quite fit into the fabric I had bought, even though I had bought slightly more than the pattern had said. It was close, another half metre or maybe even a quarter metre would have sorted it. I got round it by having one skirt panel cut slightly off the grain and having a very scant seam allowance for about 6 inches near the bottom, but it was very annoying. 

In the pattern photos, there is nice contrast between the wrong and right side of the main fabric, but there could be a higher contrast between the main fabric and lining fabric. But otherwise, I did find there were enough photos and they were clear enough to follow easily.

I am happy with the pattern purchase and I could definitely use it again to make some more dresses, though probably not as formal as this one. I would use the shorter neckline and probably the shorter hemline. 

And, most importantly, the dress I got at the end looked like what I had envisaged when I bought the pattern and the fabrics. And it fit right in with all the other bridesmaids (I was the only one who chose to make my dress). Here are the bridesmaids and bridesmaidsmen with the bride all ready to go. Photo by Jason M Saddler of Sugar and Spice Photography. Children are mine. 

And to end with, here is a picture of the awesomely beautiful bride and groom, my sister Vanessa and brother-in-law Jon-Frode. I am so happy for these two people and very proud to have been included in their big day.

Thanks for reading!