Strawberries and Cream

I bought this lovely McCalls pattern on eBay a while ago and have made the wiggle dress version already. With the Manchester vintage fair coming up, I decided to make the full skirt version out of this wonderful, summer cotton.

I saw this strawberry fabric at my local warehouse and it was love at first sight.

I knew that I would have to do some adjusting as cotton is so unforgiving, I just didn't realise how much!


The skirt and the trim at the front were the only real "easy" bits of the dress to finish. The bodice however was a whole other story.

Firstly, with the help of a very dear friend (my lovely boyfriends mum) I had to make two toiles, one of which was a complete disaster, the other slightly more successful. Then readjusted the top and side darts in the bodice as the pattern has an open dart which was in the wrong place after all the changes that were made.

It took a good few hours work to get the bodice to fit and by the time we had tweeked, trimmed and altered the pattern was a shadow of itself!

Once the bodice was right came the sleeve fiasco (haha). A toile sleeve needed to be made seperately as that needed to be changed and this meant that the armholes needed some fine tuning as well.

The rest was a walk in the park compared to all that faff!

All in all the hard work and countless hours of trimming and refitting have paid off and I'm pleased with the end result.

A vintage dress made to measure, what girl doesn't dream of such an item in their wardrobe.

Hugs and Kisses

Ana

xxx