Pride dress 2017 edition

This is my (hopefully) first entry for the Hack It! contest over at The Monthly Stitch.

So, the rainbow dress I made for Pride in 2015 is a little too baggy on me now, so I decided that I needed a new one.  Instead of just repeating what I did before, I decided to try something different.

I sketched out what I was hoping to achieve.


I decided to use the Seamwork Mesa for my starting pattern.  I've made it twice before and I knew it fit pretty well.  I did go down a size from my previous ones and I think it's even a better fit now.  I compared the front and the back of the dress pattern and decided that they were close enough in size/shape that I'd be ok just making two fronts and sewing them together, which made this hack much easier.  So first I printed out the dress front piece twice and taped them together to make a full piece.


You can see above that I sketched in the lines for the rainbow pieces.  I did a combination of eyeballing and measuring to get them to roughly appear even.  I then colored in the stripes to help keep which piece goes with which color fabric once I started cutting out the pieces.


I then cut each piece apart and added seam allowances.  I even added actual notches like a good seamstress!  As you may have noticed in the photo above, I messed up my rainbow coloring.  Luckily, I figured it out while I was still adding the seam allowances and fixed the colors with some permanent markers over my colored pencil.



The fabrics I used all happen to be in my ginormous stash.  I have a bunch of nylon/lycra active wear fabrics that I pick up on sale from Fabric Mart and Fashion Fabrics Club whenever I can so that I am able to make a ballroom gown on a moment's notice, if I were to so choose to do so.


Since I made the decision to just make two front pieces and sew them together, I was able to just cut a double layer of each color.


I then just sewed each half of the main dress together and cut one red and one yellow sleeve and sewed it all together.  I would have liked to split the sleeve into yellow and green like in my sketch, but I was doing this the day before I needed to wear the dress, so I got a little lazy.


And the back is just a mirrored image of the front.



And here we are on the Link light rail, heading down to Seattle Pride.


I didn't take all that many photos of the actual parade, but I did get particularly misty eyed when I saw Wizards of the Coast walking, so I had to grab a photo.  I had just left a couple weeks before and had been in a lot of the planning meetings for their first ever appearance in the parade.  I'm so proud to have been a part of that company.


After the parade, we had dinner downtown with the kids and then the hubby and I went to see Romy and Michele the Musical.  He managed to get a couple not terrible shots of me on the streets of Seattle.



You can see a little of the stripe matching on the side.


In front of the show poster that is cut off and obscured.  haha.


I'm quite proud of this dress and I'll be happy to wear it again next year and I might even decide to just wear it around because it's a pretty awesome dress.  I also plan on reusing the pattern for a striped version, possibly in Seahawks colors.

Comments

  1. I love this! Watching your process for color-blocking is also helpful.

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