Making A Dress For Wimbledon
Last week I went to Wimbledon for the first time, and I couldn’t miss an opportunity to make myself a gorgeous new dress!
As always I started by getting ideas out of my head and onto paper by sketching them out.
Once I had a favourite (with a little help from an Instagram poll) I grabbed my bodice block and set to drafting it!
It might look like a simple dress, but there were a few things that I needed to carefully consider and work into my drafting.
Firstly, It’s got a low V and a halter neck so I needed to work some contouring into the draft to prevent it gaping too badly.
Secondly, there is no waist seam. Instead there is an empire line and vertical seams running through the skirt. The perfect place to add some volume to the skirt!
Then of course, the bodice hasn’t got standard darts. There are gathers instead!
And lastly the centre front opening. It’s tempting to fit this exactly to the body, but with an opening like this you want to keep a fair amount of ease to prevent gaping.
Once I drafted the pattern it went straight into a toile for a first fitting.
There are always things that need tweaking and perfecting when you’re drafting for yourself so this step is essential.
Overall I was pretty happy with the toile. I made some small tweaks including:
Dropping the neckline
Removing a tiny bit of gaping through the neck
Scooping out the armhole
Reducing the back top edge and empire seam
All in all, small changes. Yay!
You know what came next…cutting and making the final dress.
I chose a white linen as my final fabric and thought that I had some lining to match.
I was wrong! Luckily Good Fabric came to the rescue and I managed to get some white cotton voile. Not a perfect colour match, but good enough in a pinch!
I chose possibly the hottest day of the year to sew this dress, so inevitably things went wrong and I had to get my unpicker out (I’m sure you know the frustration of this well)
When you sew in a rush (and it’s very hot) corners get cut. And I didn’t test my gather grain. Suffice to say that after completing 90% of the dress I decided to recut the bodice on the opposite grain and remake it…the perfectionist in me is alive and well!
It was worth the extra time though, the dress turned out beautifully and I couldn’t have been happier wearing it on the day.
I even got stopped twice by strangers to say that they loved my dress.
Does anything beat the thrill that comes with “Thanks, I made it!” ?
I don’t think so.
If you're sitting there thinking "I could never make something like that," I want you to know the difference isn't talent or natural ability, it's having the right support and techniques to build your confidence step by step.
Whether you're working on your first fitted dress or your fiftieth, remember this: every expert was once a beginner who kept going.
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The Project Patterns membership is where home sewists support each other through exactly these kinds of challenges, with tutorials, live Q&As, and a community that celebrates every win (and learns from every wobble).
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