This has been on my list for so long, and the fabric has been allocated to it, which I believe is a Meet Milk viscose. Recent success buoyed me onward. I hate making zero waste things. I need a lot of prompting. I just so dislike measuring fabric on the floor and cutting it without pattern pieces. I also feel like the end results are often shapeless dresses that suit larger women with curves and are uncomfortably airy on me.
I'm going to cut to the most important part here. My fabric was chosen long ago and the vision was deeply embedded in my brain. The designer notes in passing that the width of the fabric matters, but mainly to say it should be 140 cm wide, not to comment closely on how much that matters. I absolutely needed to make this from a 115 cm wide fabric. I recommend doing so to anyone who is a size US 6 or below. My fabric just happened to be 150 cm wide and it's devastating, because all the effort gone into sewing this project is wasted as I need to be about 6 sizes larger to suit my dress.
I suffered through the cutting and indeed, I had no leftover scraps except those ridiculous side-hem triangles. Those are a joke right? Who is actually going to randomly sew on a triangle to the side seam?
I made the version with the button bodice but no buttons on the skirt. Can't be bothered with that.
I lengthened the bodice by 1" which was totally silly. I shortened the hem by 15 cm which was a good starting point - it was below knee/calf length but had a very high low hem when worn by me. I ended up snipping off the hem until it hung more or less evenly.
I made the bodice which was fine, forgot the interfacing for the front button band. This is bad as it carries a lot of weight. I recommend interfacing it quite heavily.
The sleeve, when loosely pinned on, came to my wrist, no thanks! I put the sleeves aside for later
The pocket situation was also off-putting. I ended up using my leftover pieces from part of the sleeves to make Bardon pockets (still the best ever) and just applied them as to any skirt.
I put on the dress to even the hem, then still did a deep 2" hem, which caused some headaches due to the curves. I can call it a success: there is nothing visible on the outside! And it gives it a bit more weight.
For the sleeves I ended up just double folding in the seam allowance at the top of the bodice, and did not put any sleeves on. It's so very wide on me it already is like having half length sleeves.
Despite trying quite hard to personalise the fit on this dress, it needs to find a new owner who is a lot wider than I am. I do think it's a beautiful concept and the gathered skirt hangs and swishes really nicely. I don't even have a suitable person in my usual recipient group, so it may be off to the secondhand shop, sadly. The people who have successfully made this and posted on Instagram have had a few things in their favour: they are very tall, so they can make a longer length to balance the width, and they have used narrow fabrics.
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