29/12/2015

2015 Christmas Party Dress

I'm back home after a quick Christmas visit with our families.  Hope you all had a great Christmas as well :)  Thankfully, we made it home before the snowstorm hit!  Ottawa woke up to a good 20+cm of snow, with more falling throughout the day today.
Since I'm stuck inside for the day, I'm finally back to some blogging!

For the past three years I've been making my dress for the office Christmas Party, and this year I had an idea in mind - and I managed to make exactly what I was imagining!
I managed to find the sheer black polka-dotted fabric online from an Etsy shop in Montréal.
For the rest of the dress, I used a black suiting-weight fabric with a touch of stretch and texture, which I found at Fabricland.  Good gravy was all this stuff tricky to work with.  I had originally planned on using a black quilting cotton for the bodice and underskirt, but I couldn't find any that was nice enough.  It definitely would have been a bit easier to work with, but the fabric I ended up using had a nice stretch, so it was comfy!

I used the Christine Haynes Emery Dress pattern as my base, and cut both the front and back just above the bust line.  I cut the top from the sheer fabric, and the bottom 2 times for the main/ lining of the bodice.
For the back closure, I used an invisible zipper up to the end of the solid fabric, and left a large key-hole opening, closed with a shiny black button.  For the sleeves and the edges of the sheer fabric I 'hemmed' them with black double-fold bias tape.
For the hem, I wanted the sheer fabric to stand out a bit, so I left it about 6in longer than the underskirt.  I simply serged the edge of the underskirt, and left the hem on the sheer fabric raw.  I'm really happy with how it turned out!  For extra poofyness I wore a crinoline underneath.
I am SO proud of how this dress turned out - despite a couple small things that could have gone better.  I managed to really impress a bunch of people at the office Christmas party (even my boss and the company president!) and I felt like a million bucks wearing it.  I even managed to get a second wear in the following Saturday at a wedding reception.  The Emery Dress pattern was really easy to work with, and fit well without any huge alterations.  The skirt has the perfect amount of gathering, and the sleeves are far from frumpy!  I have three more bunches of fabric just calling out to be made into another Emery Dress.  Here's a few more pictures of the dress - including an 'action' shot at the party.



2 comments:

  1. Looks amazing! Makes me wish I were brave enough to sew with sheer fabrics.

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