Summer style, Summer dress M7744

I am taking a momentary hiatus from my much loved neutral color palette: black, beige, grey, navy, white. You know the safe colors where you can’t go wrong. The ones you naturally gravitate to in the store when you’re spending good money. Lol.

So I’m on to Summer sewing. Summer deservers to be capitalized because it’s my season. I love heat, sunshine, flowers, beaches…anything bright. I’ve already done some fabric shopping at fabric.com and Mood Fabrics and been on a pattern shopping spree, so I’m good to go. 

I have extra incentive because I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard for a week this summer and the goal is to sew my entire wardrobe. Mainly I’ll be beach bumming it, but we have a few festivals and events to attend, so I wanna look decent.

My first piece is this super-girly off the shoulder dress from McCall’s. It’s the kind of dress that makes you twirl. I maded View C in a size 10, which was too large for me. This is a generously sized pattern through the bodice so a full bust adjustments isn’t needed.

I hemmed this a little shorter to make it more of a fun day dress. The fabric I used is a floral challis from fabric.com that is 100% rayon and has a truly fluid drape. I lined it with synthetic white fabric that was in my stash.

The fit of this dress is focused on the gathering at the top of the sleeves AND around the upper chest. This should be slightly snug to keep the dress up over the breasts. I did not alter the pattern, instead I inserted 1″ elastic into the back bodice casing to help keep the dress up.

With that said, there is a lot of fullness to the dress that made it a wee excessive for me. My solution was to sew ties at each side seam. They are loosely tied at the back and take some of the volume out of the dress without changing the intended drape.

One of the things I absolutely love about this dress are the sleeves. There are ties sewn at the sleeve seam that add interest.

 

As mentioned earlier, I lopped off about 3 inches from the hem. Other than those few things, that was the extent of my alternations. I like it enough to sew it again, but will definitely draft some of the fullness out.

Very happy with this, but on to the next summer piece!