The inspiration, the recreation. Episodes II: The Val dress.

Hello wonderful people of NeedleworkMonday. Trust you are doing great. Today I am pleased to share with you yet again another attempt I made at recreating a dress I saw online. Also, it is my pleasure to announce my recent decision to improve on my sewing. With that being said, I have decided to make this a series, trying to recreate new styles every week.

This is because I feel that a great fashion designer should be able to master the art if tailoring and also, being a seamstress. Mind you, the job of a fashion designer, a Tailor and a Seamstress are completely different paths.
A Tailor is one who AMENDS dresses, a Seamstress is one who RECREATES designs and a Fashion designer is one who CREATES a whole new design. So in simple terms;
To amend is to tailor
To recreate is to be a seamstress and
To design is to be a fashion designer.
So my dear fashion enthusiasts which do you think is more demanding. Anyways, I particularly think it is much more difficult to be a designer because it requires an innovative mind. I also believe one of the many steps I must attain to becoming a great fashion designer is by mastering all the skills.

Back to business as usual shall we, because the season of love is almost coming to an end, I couldn’t help myself, i just knew I had to post this because I don’t feel it would be relevant after the month has ended.

In recreating this dress all i used were:

I. One and a half yard of fabric preferable a stretchy one.
II. One yard of lining also a stretchy one
III. A matching color of thread
IV. A pattern paper
V. A ribbon ( optional)
VI. And of cause your basic equipment (curve ruler, a chuck or pen and definitely your measuring tape).

THE PROCESS

First step I started by drafting my measurements on my pattern paper and then transferring it to my main fabric.

After transferring it to my fabric and lining for the sake of accuracy, I took out one inch from the bottom part of the lining.

I then turned the neck of the dress with the lining and joined the shoulders.

I cut out my sleeves and note that for my sleeves I didn’t use lining. I joined the sleeves and covered up my dress from side to side.

To achieve the twirly ends I had an English weaving done on it.

Because of how transparent I am trying to be, I am going to fill you in on a little secrete. This dress was far from perfect . This was only because of one mistake I made. I used a non-stretchy lining and this limited my dress a lot. Considering the fact it didn’t have a zipper and it wasn’t meant to in the first place, I didn’t bother leaving zipper allowance.
Rather, I corrected my mistakes by being more spontaneous. I added some extra allowance on the waist area so it would be possible for me to wear the dress.
Even after doing so , that didn’t make much difference because I couldn’t still get the dress to pass my bust area due to my body type. I have a small waist of 29, bust of 35 and hips of 40. So my waist area couldn’t really pass my bust and make it down.
Now I knew adding extra allowance wasn’t going to make things better. Also, I couldn’t add more allowance it would spoil the shaping of my dress completely.

I decided to make a huge opening at the back and that worked alright but to me it wasn’t quite perfect, I wanted the snatch waist effect and that was were the ribbon came in. I made tiny loops at the back and passed my ribbon through them and that was how i got my final result.