Bridesmaid dress

Next week my daughter is going to be a bridesmaid in a friends wedding. The bride picked out the fabric for the dress and told all the bridesmaids they could pick out their own style of dress to sew. Fortunately my daughter has a mom who can sew quite well. However the fabric choice gave us quite a challenge. When we received the 2 and 1/2 yards of fabric in the mail we wondered how we were ever going to make a dress much less a bridesmaid dress with it. The fabric is a very large scale swirl tie dyed quilting cotton. And it has just about every color of the rainbow in it. The brides only request was that the dress be knee length and use this fabric. My daughters first thought was to use this fabric for the lining. She was allowed to pick a coordinating fabric to use with this main fabric. So we picked out this bright pink batik fabric.

For the pattern we chose McCall's 5094 view F. We used the tie dye fabric for the skirt and the straps with the bright pink for the bodice the waistband and the lower band on the skirt. The dress was very easy to put together which was a good thing because I didn't have a lot of time to make a complicated design.

This dress took about three hours to sew together except for the hem. But when my daughter tried it on the neck was to large so I had to make some alterations to get it to fit. I had to add some darts to the front and move the zipper in a bit at the back. Because of the way the dress was constructed the alterations took a bit of time because I had to unsew several parts to get to the area I needed to alter. If I had thought to do a bit more measuring before cutting out the pattern I could have cut the neckline smaller in the first place.

I think the dress turned out much better than I anticipated. And it does look adorable on my girl. But she has decided that she will only wear it for the wedding and will never wear it again. I guess that is the case with most bridesmaid dresses you never have an opportunity to wear them again. She does like the style of the dress if it were made with different fabric. Maybe we will try it with a fabric of her choice next time.