My New Dress

A few weeks ago I found a great piece of chiffon fabric at the thrift store for $3.  That was super cheap since it was about 3 yards of fabric.  I had already bought the pattern a few weeks before that.  I dug around to see if I had a knit that would match the chiffon, and I did!  Yay!  So the whole of the dress cost me about $4 total (plus time but that doesn't count for me since I love to sew for myself).  Here's what the pattern looked like:

 

Obviously I had to make some modifications to the pattern; mainly I had to add sleeves since I don't do sleeveless.  I also had to bring in the neckline because it would have been too low for me.  Adding sleeves to something like this is actually pretty easy.  You measure the circumference of the hole and then make a sleeve pattern about that long.  Here's mine.

Now I had to do a little tricky work because I wanted the right sleeve to have the overlay fabric on it while the left sleeve didn't matter because it would be under the overlay.  So here I add the overlay fabric to the sleeve.  This is never easy but I find myself doing it over and over.  You can also see a close up of the overlay fabric here.

So here is the finished dress part.  You can see what I did with the sleeves.  It sure looks funny now but wait until you see the finished product!

Here is the boring fuchsia dress with the weird sleeve.

And here is the finished product with the flowy overlay.  This is kind of a different style for me but I like it because it is unique.  It didn't all work out the way I planned, but I still like it (and it was cheap!), and the neckline isn't too low, which is always nice.  You can also see now that the weird sleeve matches with the overlay.  I can't wait to see if anyone makes any comments on this dress at church this week.