The Pucci Dress Saga

Thank you all for your supportive posts regarding my Pucci print dress - I feel much better now, but trust me the dress did look terrible on me, maybe if I were a foot taller or 30lbs lighter it would be OK. I think you are all right that someone with a small bust would be fine in it. Lindsay T summed it up quite well in her hilarious comment;

"Your dressform looks like Mrs. Doubtfire. Tee hee hee."

So what is the best thing to do after a wadder when your confidence has taken a big knock?  Make something easy? No of course not - I decided to make another Pucci print dress - this time as a surprise for a friends birthday. I know, certifiable aren't I? 

I decided to make the jersey dress from BWOF 02/2008 - 103. 

I love this pattern although I don't know if it would work on me, my friend though is very petite and I am really pleased with how it came out. I was really careful cutting it out to make sure one of the large yellow dots didn't end up in the wrong place!

 This was quite an easy pattern to put together once I had figured out with the paper pattern pieces how the twist part needed to be assembled. The BWOF instructions were quite good except for the first part which read "between the asterisks..." Well there are no asterisks which was exceedingly annoying!

The finished dress

Top detail

Skirt detail (I have no idea how the pattern matched so well - a happy accident!

Twist detail

I also turned my dress into a skirt. I just reshaped the back skirt panel to make it a little less full and used one of the front wraps as the skirt front. I added some elastic at the waistband and a narrow hem and voila - one expensive, simple, comfortable elastic waist skirt. Mrs Doubtfire would be proud. Emilio Pucci, not so much!

Dress Disaster!

I had such high hopes for this dress while making it and I feel so stupid for not spotting the glaring error earlier. I was making the popular Vogue wrap dress, 8379 in some (admittedly loud) print jersey, really nice fabric.

Here is a picture of the fabric.



Here is a picture of the back of the incomplete dress. So far so good. Now this is a pretty random geometric print and I only just managed to cut all the pattern pieces with the fabric I had - other than cutting the back skirt on the fold in place of a seam, I didn't think about layout at all.



Well I should have. Here is the sad state of the front of the dress - seriously I could not have placed those white bands there if I had tried! It looks even more noticeable on me than on the dressform. The fabric is too good to waste so I'm going to ditch the top and turn it into a skirt, hopefully I will manage not to mess that up.

Wedding Pictures

I was working in Vietnam all last week, only getting back on Saturday so I have really missed my sewing machine. Still, a little break after the marathon wedding outfit is probably no bad thing. Would you believe HK had freakishly warm weather throughout October and it turned out to be way to hot to wear the coat! I carried it around for the wedding and then checked it in over dinner. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and whizzed up a wrap. Never mind, we have been invited to another wedding later this month so I'll try again! The purple shoes won in the end and matched the bridesmaids outfits!



Next on the list I have 2 jersey dresses planned, I just have to decide which to attempt first;
The very popular Vogue 8379 wrap dress in a grey/purple/black/white Pucci print jersey;

The newish McCalls pattern 5752 in a purple butterfly print silk jersey;