The Not New Year's Eve Dress Nearly Done

Is it chilly where you are today? Or perhaps extremely cold, much too cold to get fixed up to model a short sleeved party dress?

It's not just the cold--my dress also still lacks a hem and it may do so for some time to come, since I have no definite occasion for wearing it in sight. As I mentioned yesterday, this was intended to be my New Year's Eve dress. Even though it's not over-the-top glamorous--and there were definitely some OTT dresses at the party I attended, from glittery to beaded to backless, from full-length to tiny and body hugging and every place in between--I thought the emerald color would make a bit of a statement in a dressy crowd.

Even though I've made Simplicity 1882 before, I managed to find ways to struggle with this one. First, the sleeves just did not cooperate with my desire to set them in smoothly. I tried three times with the first set of sleeves, trimming the caps just a bit more each time and finally feeling that they had become too distorted to be going on with. So I redrew the sleeve pattern pieces, reducing the height (via a horizontal tuck about 2" down from the top of the sleeve) by 1/4" and the width (via a vertical tuck at the center of the sleeve) by 1/4" before cutting the pieces in my extra fabric. I also departed from the pattern instructions by not self-lining the sleeves. In this fabric, the seam allowance felt bulky with two pieces of sleeve fabric plus the bodice fabric. Instead, I cut a 1 1/4" bias strip of the fashion fabric to face the sleeve hem edge (sewed right sides together, turned to the inside and then edgestitched to the inside of the sleeve), which I then hand catch-stitched in place.

Oh, and I meant to note that the shoulders felt a bit narrow in this edition of the dress, so I sewed them with a 3/8" seam allowance rather than 5/8". My previous version of this pattern was made from a stretch woven, which would account for a different fit through the shoulders than this polyester crepe-back satin.

The other way I made things hard on myself was by deciding to use the shiny satin face for the waist section as well as the collar and pocket facings. I thought it would make the dress more fancy by functioning something like a cummerbund. But when I finally had everything put together, I wasn't happy with the contrasting waist. For my figure, it simply drew too much light and attention to the last place I would want it. So out came the midriff and the zipper. Cutting new midriff pieces enabled me to shorten the waist section by 1/2", which subtly improves the fit.

Although it is several days late for its intended function, and still not entirely finished, at least I feel that this dress is finally coming together in a satisfying way. As a red-headed teenager in the late 1980s, I wore lots of emerald and forest green. But then those colors fell out of favor, both in fashion and with my then-boyfriend, now husband. I've been longing to try emerald green again. I hope I will enjoy it as much now as I did 25 years ago!