Peacock Dress

A blog post about this dress is well and truly overdue. If you follow me on instagram or twitter you'll have seen a sneak peek of it on New Years Eve. Yes, you didn't read that wrong, a whopping 50 odd days ago!

You've seen the fabric, it was one of the pieces I bought at Spotlight just after Christmas, and as I knew what I was going to make with it as soon as I saw the fabric, it didn't take me long to cut into it to start making a dress. This dress is essentially an exact replica of one of my favourite summer dresses that I've made, the red vintage simplicity 3965 knockoff (another new-years dress in fact! Made almost much exactly 2 years earlier).

  

I spent a really long time working out the perfect pattern placement for the fabric. The front was tricky, trying to avoid an awkwardly placed flower on the front bodice! The back was easy though, and I'm so happy with it! Thankfully the fabric was fairly see through, so I could place the pattern pieces underneath the fabric and see their placement exactly through. I also marked the seam allowances onto the pattern pieces to help with this.

 

However, a down side of the see-through-ness of the fabric was that the bodice was see through even when I had lined it with some batiste - the seam allowances on the neckline were particularly visible. So I added an additional underlining layer to the bodice to solve this problem (so the bodice has peacock fabric and then two layers of the batiste lining fabric).

 

I've worn the dress around the house a few times, but Saturday was the first chance I had to wear it out and about, when I wore it to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra free concert at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl (if you're in Melbourne you should definitely try to go to one of the concerts; there's still two more this Wednesday and on Saturday evenings). Anyway, while I was at the MSO concert I even got an 'unsolicitation' from the lady sitting next to us.