A New Temple Dress

My latest project took me about three months to complete.  With an average of an hour of sewing per week, I'd say that's pretty good.  For those who don't know, a temple dress is the dress that members of our church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) change into when we get to the temple to serve there.  We wear our regular church clothes on the drive to the temple and then change into our white dresses when we get there.  A temple dress is white with long sleeves and generally goes down to the ankle.  The temple is the only place I will ever wear this dress but because we honor the temple as the House of the Lord, I wanted it to turn out great.

So I began by cutting out my dress.  I used a blouse pattern that I knew I liked and just elongated it to fit my height.  The fabric is a polyester that I bought over four years ago with this exact project in mind.  The reason it took me so long is about six months after I bought the fabric I started on my weight loss and infertility journey and lost a lot of weight.  I decided to wait until my weight normalized a little before starting the project.

So I cut it out in one night.  Then I started sewing it: that's when the disasters began.  Of course I was sewing in the evening after the kids went to bed.  The first thing I did was use a cloth to cover the fabric to iron it and it transferred some pink ink to the white fabric.  That meant I had to cut that piece out again.  Then, I messed up in one area and started to use my seam ripper only to rip a big hole right into the bodice of my dress.  When I tried to fix it things just got worse and I ended up throwing away the entire night of work.  That meant that I had to recut some of my fabric pieces.  Luckily I had plenty of fabric.  Some pieces I cut out once.  Some I cut out twice.  And some I cut out three times.  There was one point in my process where I said to myself, "just go buy different fabric and scrap it," but I didn't.  I really wanted to.  But once I got past a certain point it all went smoothly.  And I very smartly began sewing in the early afternoon while the kids napped instead of in the evening.  I am really pleased with how it turned out, especially for how much time and work I put into it.

 A close up of the bodice.