Hey guys! Welcome to a new sewing video. I'm making a summer dress today and I am tackling a
rather notorious pattern, if I understand correctly. I looked up reviews of this
one before I set out to make it, and apparently this pattern here, that I want to use, with this
beautiful versatile dress with tie straps on the top that should allow you to wear it like
six different ways, just doesn't work. I have seen loads of reviews online of this pattern and people
experience all kinds of different problems with it, so this is one to be careful with. I'm still
gonna do it though. I love this pattern, I already bought it before I knew how notorious it was,
and I think this could be a really cute dress. However, I'm not just gonna jump
into this and make it and hope for the best. We're gonna approach this one a little bit
differently. First of all, my fabric. I have this gorgeous lights and airy green fabric with daisies
on it. Adorable, really cute. I think this will be perfect for summer. It feels like a very cool
fabric to wear on hot days, and yeah, I just really like this fabric for that pattern. You
could make this pattern more formal if you use a thicker, maybe shinier, fabric, something a little
bit more luxurious. I want to go for a very light and airy summer dress type of feel with this, so
this fabric I think is going to be perfect for that. I decided to cut out the pattern pieces
and do a paper pattern fitting. Now, one issue that many people had with this pattern
is that it was very tight around the bust. The measurements just don't match up.
Right here it says the measurements for the finished garments, and it's just incorrect.
A size 12, which is what I have here, should be 90 centimeters, but when you measure this,
no slack in this pattern currently or very little,
it only measures 87, maybe. I can already tell that it is indeed going to be
too small. I think this is gonna be a problem on me. What I'm considering doing now is just adding
some length here on the side of this pattern, right here, grading it out
like that, so that I can scrunch it up here a little bit more. This will stay the same,
this width will stay the same, the neckline won't get wider, but I will have a little bit more
room at the bottom here so that I can bunch that up a little bit and get a little bit more room,
and hopefully that is enough and that should fix it, because I do think that the midriff
here looks fine. The ties look fine to me. Some people complained the ties were comically large,
I don't mind that. I like a big sleeve, I like a statement on the shoulders, I don't mind that.
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below, and let's continue with sewing. Another thing about this pattern, apparently, is that the
instructions are just plain horrible, and you'd better not follow them. So that's what I'm gonna
do. I'm gonna not follow the instructions and simply construct this dress. It consists of only
five pattern pieces, including the skirt. It looks very straightforward to assemble, honestly,
and I have read through the instructions and they do make it more complicated
than I think it needs to be. They also tell you to make the bodice,
then attach the skirt to the bodice, and only then make the lining and line the bodice
with the skirt already on, which just seems a very inconvenient way to do things. So I'm not gonna do
that, I'm just gonna make my entire bodice, then attach my skirt, do my zipper and everything.
Yeah, I'm gonna start with the bodice itself. So the bodice consists of these two
pieces that come up right here and then the center bit up top,
which is the one that I have altered, I made a little bit bigger.
So I'm going to attach this first and then work on the front. The center. The top. The other part.
Here is my front top. I have ease stitched between the two dots on the pattern. I moved,
of course, my dot out by the same amount that I lengthened it, so I should have more room
for gathering here than is on the original pattern. And I'm now going to attach that, so it
should come out looking a little something like this. Then that should be my front bodice done!
I have a front and a back, they are
kind of attached. I was only supposed to attach them with like half a seam, but I should be able
to tell now whether this will fit or not. So I'm just gonna go ahead and drape it on my mannequin.
Not bad, I think! There is definitely more room than there was when I first draped it.
I'm actually thinking there might be a bit too much room even, in this midriff section.
I might do a fitting on my body before I attach the lining to this, because that's going to make
it harder to do any alterations. But so far I'm pretty happy with it. A zipper is going
to go in on this side, that's why it's still open. Looks good, I think! Let's try it on me.
Okay, my bodice is lined, ah, there we go. It looks all right,
I must say. There is just one kind of weird thing with it, in the back there is this little pocket
of just extra fabric, and i'm not sure what to do with that.
I'm probably going gonna regret this but I think I'm just gonna leave it for now,
and see how it looks when the dress is finished, and then figure out how to deal with that. So I'm
gonna leave the bodice for now. It does have kind of the same thing in the front as well,
I think it's just the shape of that point which is on a bias and probably stretched out a little bit.
Anyways, the skirt is nearly finished as well. I sewed all the skirt pieces together into
one long panel, there we go, and now I just need to gather up my gathers
to the right size, attach it to the bodice and then sew in a zipper.
Here we have it, the final dress! It is finished!
I honestly must say guys, I think this may be one of my favorite dresses I've ever made,
which is very unexpected. I think it turned out fantastic, honestly. Just looking at it right now,
I love the fabric, I think it works really well with this material. It feels so soft and light,
barely feels like I'm even wearing anything. It's so comfortable and soft.
I absolutely love the the fabric, as in the color and the print. I think that works wonderfully,
again, with this dress, the type of dress. I feel like it came out very playful and summery.
I love the length and yeah, I'm just i'm a huge fan of this dress, honestly, but I think that
is only because I went into this warned, and I knew what things to look out for and that I just
should not follow the instructions, which I'm very very glad that I did because the instructions were
indeed kind of weird. I'm also very glad that I added those extra four centimeters
to the bust area, because now it fits perfectly, which means that if I hadn't added those four
centimeters it would not have fit at all. That little extra bit of fabric I had in the back
is still there, but it became a lot less obvious when I attached the skirt, so I think honestly I'm
probably just gonna leave it like this. I don't know if I can be bothered at this point to take
the whole thing apart, including the lining, and trying to fix that. I don't think it is bad enough
that you can tell, and it is, you know, it's not super noticeable. I think this is one of
the occasions where my bad posture kind of works in my favor. One thing I did do to the back that
I haven't mentioned yet, I think, is I took this bottom section, the middle section in the back,
and I cut out a little triangle to make it a little bit tighter towards the waist. So I did
cinch the waist a little bit, but all in all I just adore it. I absolutely love the top and
how you can tie it in all these different ways. The pattern itself shows you four different ways
to tie it, so it starts with the obvious kind of ties up top, on top of the shoulders, like this.
But then you can also tie your ties in the front, that leaves you with a little bit of
almost like a cap sleeve, in a way. So you just pull the back bit over your shoulder and then
you tie it in the front by wrapping the front tie around, so they are more or less the same length,
and tying it like that. Third option is to wear it strapless, and then you just tie both
ties under the armpits. And the fourth option is a one shoulder option where you have one
tie under the armpit, and one side on top of the shoulder which looks really really cute as well.
And then the fifth option that you can also do, it's not mentioned in the pattern but
you can also do an off shoulder version by just tying it off shoulder, yeah.
And I think that looks really cute as well. I'm sure there are even more different ways that you
could tie this, but I honestly love the look of all of these. Although I do think that just on top
of the shoulders is my favorite look. I kind of like how this does a little cowl neck thing when
you do it like that. In the pattern reviews that I read, some people mentioned that it was quite hard
to tie ties on yourself, that's not my experience. I only needed a couple minor adjustments to take
this from a pattern of horrors to something I really, really, really love, and once again I'm
very happy with my results. I actually really like the size of these bows, I think they're perfect,
I don't think they are too large at all. Oh, by the way, something else that I deviated from the
pattern with is my zipper. You're supposed to use a blind zipper, I used a contrasting normal zipper
so my zipper is quite prominent, but I couldn't find a blind zipper on the website that I was
ordering from when I was ordering this fabric so I just decided to go for whatever zipper they had,
and they didn't have a very wide range of green so I decided to go with a contrasting color,
rather than a slightly different shade of green which would have just annoyed me. So yeah,
I decided to go for this creamy white and I think it works quite well, I'm not bothered by it. I can
honestly say I think this will be one of my new favorite summer dresses. It is so comfortable!
I think it's adorable, I love all the different ways that I can wear it,
and yeah, it's a good dress. It is a good dress, and I was able to actually make almost the whole
thing in a day. This morning I just slip stitched the lining and I inserted the zipper, and if I had
done that by machine and not by hand that would have been a lot faster as well. So honestly I
think I could have done this in a day, maybe. That is where I'm gonna end the video guys, I'm really
curious if any of you have attempted to sew this pattern and if so, how did it turn out? I really
hope you enjoyed this video guys, if you did don't forget to give a thumbs up and subscribe to my
channel for lots more beauty, fashion, sewing and lifestyle content. I want to give another massive
thank you to Function of Beauty for sponsoring today's video, don't forget to check out the
link in the description box. There's another video here that I think you might also enjoy, you can go
watch next. Thank you so much for watching guys, and I'll see you very soon in my next video. Bye!
