Chameleon dress

I promised myself that I would conquer my fear and sew blouses this summer...but why sew blouses when dresses are easier??  What I most love about dresses is that they don't have to match up with anything else, nor do they have to by tucked in and yanked into place throughout the day.  This is my latest dress, in maxi length.

The pattern is the "Chameleon Dress" from Twinkle Sews.  I'll pop the pattern details in my pattern review.

The fabric is just gorgeous.  It is Nouveau Bloom from Tessuti; a silk/cotton voile border print..  It has a beautiful wood nymph-ish feel about it.  I'm always a sucker for a wood nymph fantasia theme.  One of my first fashion influences was a huge glossy book, possibly published in the eighties, showcasing Australian designers (hazy memories, but I'm thinking Morrissey, Trent Nathan, Adele Palmer, Carla Zampatti).  There was a double page spread of a dark forest, with all these girls wandering through the trees in flowy white dresses.  It was a library book and I'm pretty sure I kept it way overdue.  I would love to stumble across it again.

I lined the dress in cotton voile and the bust cups and neckline trim were from my remnant drawer.

 

If you have this pattern, you might be thinking that my dress does not look quite like the original.  Well, you would be right.  The bust cups are in sideways.  I'm sure many of you are familiar with the process.  Layout the pattern pieces, check once,  check twice, sew, sew, sew, sit back and congratulate self on quality of edgestitching (or topstitching, or understitching), then almost immediately realise that it is upside-down.  Or back-to-front.  Or you have sewn 2 left legs because the fabric is reversible.  Etc.  I discovered this mistake when I had sewn the neckline trim to the cups and before they were attached to the dress...so not too late to fix it up...but I confess, I left it as it was.  I have been unwell lately, and the only reason I was sewing at all was because I was too ache-y to sleep.  So the dress gathers onto the bust, instead of the other way around, but, as you can see, I don't exactly need a lot of gathers over the bust.

I sewed a beautiful invisible zipper.  I applied whisperweft to the seam allowances, overlocked the edges and then basted the zipper tape in place before sewing it in.  Which was all superfluous, because then I forgot to leave an opening in the lining and in a moment of extreme laziness, overlocked the lining edges together.  Did I mention that I was feeling poorly?  I left that too. 

In spite of all that, the dress worked out fine, it just slips on over my head.  It has been so hot here that I have worn it 3 days already this week.