The Dress of Stress

So my 17 year old niece wanted me to make her a dress.  I told her I would probably suck, and we needed to find a really simple pattern because of my very limited skills.  So we found a pattern labeled "easy" and bought a zipper, some hooks and eyes that it required and some frilly lace stuff.  We didn't even know which fabric we would use when we bought the pattern.  Anyway, I came home and got started on it.  Yeah....boy did I.  Let's talk about this, analyze this for a moment.  I basically know nothing about patterns, how to read them, etc.  So I laid out the fabric, cut out the fabric pieces it said we needed, things were going relatively smooth.  But then it said something about markings....which I didn't know anything about.  Also something about notches, which I knew you had to snip them but that's all I knew.  I followed the directions the best that I could.  The dress had basically two components...the bodice and the skirt.  The bodice was actually the easier of the two, believe it or not.  The skirt was really difficult to get things to match up.  I had a really hard time with this.....REALLY hard....and I thought several times "Who would put themselves through this....and WHY?"  LOL.  Then of course I had to "fit it" on her and make adjustments.  So a career as a fashion designer is probably not in my future lol.  I think I'll stick to quilting and making home decor things, things that are more cut and dry.  Maybe I'll attempt to make another outfit in the future - I really need to learn more about patterns first though.  But for my VERY first item of clothing EVER.......I think it turned out "decent".  The ruffle things at the bottom were not part of the pattern....they happened by accident but my niece liked the look of it, so we left it as is.  And she's wearing her pants and sneakers in the picture for some crazy reason.  Also I have no snipped any of the threads yet - they had to leave and I was rushing to get the last few things done on it so I told her to just trim it when she gets home.  I am not gonna lie - this was hard to do lol.

 

giving me a statuesque pose

 

yes, the back looks rather sad lol

 

Well I guess it could have turned out alot worse lol.  My next project is going to be a pillowcase dress for each of my daughters - hopefully it'll be a lot simpler!