For one of my dressmaker exams I had to draft and sew a dress containing some ‘challenges’ that I learned to do during the past months. The biggest challenge for me actually was to come up with a design that my teacher considered to be challenging enough, while still being acceptable to wear for me. I’m just not the type for outfits with lots of frills, pleats, (welt) pockets, buttons, zippers, lining, and all this fluff… (okay, except when it comes to Victorian dresses 😉).
As I’m also not a very good draftswoman (drawing clothing designs is a skill in itself!), I photoshopped together a design based on three exercise drawings, which resulted in the following dress design:
It has a waterfall neckline, pleats on one side of the waist, and several layers in the skirt. The small sleeves are cut with the dress. I left out the zipper, because I dedided to make the dress from stretchy materials: a semi-transparant outer layer and an opaque lining layer.
Unfortunately, the outer fabric that I bought turned out to be not stretchy enough to create the subtle pleats at the waist, so that part didn’t end up as I had in mind. However, I was able to apply my pattern matching skills to the max! It took some cursing and lots of extra time, but the result came out so well that you can hardly see the three different layers in the skirt section, except when I’m moving!
