A Nightmare of a Pattern and a Dream of a Dress

I have been pursuing this dress in my mind for long. I tried with last sping with this, and although it was nice, it did not have the retro touch I wished. Finally I made it. I boought this promising pattern in ebay: ...and decided to make it with a soft black cotton I bought this summer, with embroidered white roses and little 3D spots. Well... the pattern turned out to be the worst I have worked with ever. First, after careful consultation with the sizing chart, I cut the pattern in mine, only to see in the first trying it was like six sizes bigger than me (?????!!!!). I thanked my luck because bigger is easy to mend, and I blindly cut again, this time the size I guessed would fit me. And it did. Only now the midrif piece was 5 cm longer than its back counterpart, which I could also repair (again, it was too much, easy to rewind).

I am proud of some no-lazy decisions I took that made the dress perfect. First, I ironed interfacing in all the pieces of the body; second, following recomendations from the pattern itself, I put plastic bones in the vertical seams of the body. Finally, I discarded the waist plaited skirt, since in my previous project, I found it to make me too thick at the waist. I opted instead for a full circle skirt (which I made following this instructions in the net), that turned out to be much more becoming and retro-flavoured.

The magic of the dress, though, I copied from a shop in Barcelona. It was a black net undershirt ruffle that gave volume to my dress. I designed it like this (made it double, one skirt over the other):

I was gathering, and distributing it for hours!, but it was so worth it!!