For my next birthday I want party hats.

I try to make a dress for my birthday every year. And then I forget to post about it or don't get around to it. WOOPS! Maybe it's for the best, since I wore this for my birthday party and spent the entire day eating. Crumbs and a food baby, not a great look!

I bought this fabric on a whim some time ago and thought a simple silhouette would be best, so I gave my bodice sloper a slightly higher and wider neckline with a v-neck in the back and added a slightly flared gathered skirt. There are some small things that still bother me but overall it's LOVE.

The fabric was a bit of a beast to work with. (And I only had a small piece to begin with) It's a viscose with a bit of wool (!!) thrown in, and it's loosely woven and super shifty. It also grows if you so much as look at it, so I decided almost immediately after cutting that a normal lining would never work (by the time I'd get to attaching shell and lining the shell would be two sizes bigger than the much more stable lining), so I decided to underline the bodice only and left the skirt and sleeves unlined.

Look at my glaring pattern repeat, my glaring pattern repeat is amazing!

Doing this also made sure the dress would remain fitted through the waist and bust. After washing the shell fabric has stretched and warped a bit, but I actually like the wrinkles it created. It sort of suits the fabric!

Hemming was a bit of a beast. The fabric is very lightweight so finishing the hem with bias binding would be too heavy, but just doing a rolled hem would have been way too unstable. In the end I stitched lightweight seam binding to the hem edge at the right side, turned it up once and hand-stitched it in place. I used the same method for the sleeves, and managed to keep everything under control.

The back seemed to have stretched out while I was sewing (or even before since I did stabilize those edges) so it was gaping a bit at first. The neckline was finished last with a bias facing and I was debating unpicking that so I could take something out of the back shoulder and try to fix the gaping, but washing the dress fixed the problem for me. Yay!

Remember how I mentioned falling down in a trampoline park in my previous post? This was two days later, and the bruise was really coming in by then. I got a lot of 'what the hell did you do' type questions during the following week.

I wore this dress again to see Andrew Bird in concert, which was amazing, as expected. The boyfriend and me made it to the fleamarket at the Vossenplein before the show, and the boyfriend found us a new pet:

'Go stand in front of that pixellated meat, it'll be hilarious!'

If I manage to take care of this super fine and fragile fabric I expect to wear this dress loads of times. Love love love.