I’m really excited about where this dress is going. It looks as though the pleat in the front of the skirt is the favorite (and I agree) so we are going to go with that. I took a picture of a dress I made years ago and it helped to inspire me and take our flat design into a new dimension.

This dress has the pleats in front with a contrasting fabric underneath, but the fabric underneath is a bit more prominent than just a “peek.” I wanted to take this concept to our dress, but in a slightly different way. Look how I’m messing with the skirt and the fullness of the white contrasting fabric underneath.

Little girls love full skirts and an easy and cost effective way to get that look is to cut full panels for the skirt and gather them up. The fullness of the skirt depends on how many panels of fabric you cut. Since I was thinking this skirt would be an a-line originally, I’m going to only do one panel of fabric. I will get a bit more fullness with this cut, but not too much.

As we get the front of the skirt ready for the pleats, once again we need to pay attention to flower placement and that the flowers perfectly match in the center front as the pleats touch each other. To get a more puffy “flavor” to the underneath panel, I’m widening the white panel and will gather it underneath the pleat. Hopefully what I’m seeing in my head will be what we see in the pictures when it’s sewn together. I would like to have a fuller, but not too full skirt, and the white contrast fabric under the pleat full enough to make it puff forward and be seen even without a twirl. (Fingers crossed!) This is the fun part of designing. You get to try things and try again. Fun fun.

I’m sewing the white skirt panel to the main skirt panels. I hope this works!

Now I’m ironing the sewn panels and I’m going to manipulate the pleats into the skirt.

Now that the pleats are ironed in, I need to take care of the white panel underneath by gathering it and hoping it fits under the pleats. It does! Yay!

Now that our skirt is mostly in place, it’s time to look at our bodice again. Originally I was thinking of doing a small piping at the waist to off-set the white panel in the skirt. I have changed my mind because the white in the skirt is more subdued with our pleat. I chose to do a 1.5” band of white contrast to separate the bodice and the skirt. I think this brings the white contrasts together as a whole in the piece. I need to sew the band on the bodice now.

It’s time to gather the skirt onto the bodice and see how it looks! You can see from this picture the length of the skirt panel that will be gathered. It should produce a nice looking skirt.

The skirt is on and the shoulders and back are pinned up so that I can take this shot of the dress. You can see how it’s coming along. I’m pleased with the skirt and how there is just enough pop to entice the eye. The fullness in the skirt is definitely twirl-worthy and the white underneath will be shown even more. I like the band too. The one thing I am concerned about is whether I cut the skirt too short or not. I will need to try it on my “fit model” next time around and see where we stand with that.

This blog post was a long one, but as you see we have a lot to get through to get this garment complete. We still have the zipper, lining, finishing touches, and of course the photo shoot with the model. That’s the most fun. I love love love your comments!

Love, Rachel

Monday, November 19th, 2007 - Works-In-Progress Month, Mamma-Made

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