2022 Valentine’s Dress

That title may be misleading. It's definitely probably not the 2022 style, I’m not sure I even know what “the style” is these days. I am, however, making it for a Valentine’s Dance happening the day before Valentine’s Day.

It’s my 2022 Valentine’s Day/Dance dress.

While browsing Pinterest last week I came across a dress, which then led me down the rabbit hole of dressed until I came across this one.

I knew right away I wanted to make it.

The puffed sleeves.

The pearls.

The tulle.

It would be such a great challenge and I needed a dress for the dance anyway, so why not.

Now, I was kind of in love with that color as well. But Valentine’s Day bodes more toward the red and pink end of the color spectrum.

I did come across a chart though that had all of these colors to wear on Valentine’s and the different colors signified different things. For instance; green = I am waiting, grey = not interest in love, white = sorry, already in Love, etc. So I was leaning towards a green dress, but I decided that comes across as too St. Patrick’s Day-esk. If there’s one thing you never want to do, it is confuse holidays.

Although, two years ago I wore a mint green dress to a Valentine’s Day ball, because I didn’t know it was in celebration of that particular holiday. The guy who invited me didn’t want me to think he was taking me to the dance as a date, so he just told me it was a dance, and failed to mention that I should probably wear something red, or pink, or maroon, or anything. I stuck out like green chrysanthemum in a bouquet of red roses. Despite that, I had a great time and that dress was super fun to dance in, and after a few minutes I just didn’t care that I’d clearly missed the dress code memo.

Back to this dress and this year.

I just finished last year’s Valentine’s day dress a few weeks ago and honestly was not in the mood to make something pink again.

So I left it up to my Instagram followers to decide, but worded it so that they would ultimately pick what I wanted.

P.S. To the 9% who voted for pink, I applaud you for thinking outside of the box.

With the results in hand, I went to the fabric store to try and find something that matched or was at least semi similar to what I was hoping to accomplish, but also would not cost me a lot of money.

Most of the stuff I found ended up being on sale, and the base fabric I really liked was one of the less expensive sale fabrics, which was a nice surprise.

While I was at the cutting counter the lady asked what I was making. I told her a dress for a Valentine’s dance and that I really didn’t know how much fabric I needed because I wasn’t using a patter and was just pretty much going to wing the whole thing. She then commented that everyone seems to be doing that these days. I suppose they are, but I was sewing before it was cool. Does that make me better than everyone else, probably not. It does, however, allow me to think that I know what I’m doing even when all the evidence would say otherwise. Thus I reside in this ignorant bliss brought on by total confidence in what I think I can do.

With that let’s get back to the dress.

First I made a mock up of what I wanted to bodice to be.

I have honestly never made a dress pattern before and the top always scares me. I mean skirts are pretty easy. You can literally just take a rectangle and gather the top and bam you’ve got a skirt. The top though, that’s gotta fit, and there’s a lot more to take into account. So I just grabbed a piece of paper traced out a general shape and cut that out.

I also made side pieces that I didn’t take a picture of but you’ll see them in a second.

There they are.

Yes, pinned to the front piece, but that’s the general shape. Again, I have no idea what I’m actually doing here.

I made this mock-up out of some pink satin I had in my sewing suitcase. It’s not at all like what I’m making the dress out of, but it’s shiny and looks similar enough.

Anyhow, to make the back I traced the front.

Then I consulted close up pictures of the actual bodice and realized that what I had made was just nothing at all like what I was going for. So I sketched out these pattern pieces and recreated that general shape on more scrap paper.

I then deconstructed, reshaped all of the pieces, and still came up with the wrong answer…

But it was closer (after I sewed all of that together to see just how wrong I was and then reevaluated and figured out what needed to be done differently), and then I was able to get a semi workable pattern made from a paper bag that was sitting on my floor.

Then I was faced with a dilemma. I had some curtains I needed to hem for a friend, but doing so would mean that I had to put a pause on the dress design (plagiarism), and spend time on those. I’d already lied and said I would do them on Sunday, but Sunday I was sort of sick and didn’t feel like doing anything because I had just spent the eleven days prior working at a very boring boat show. Not that the boat show itself was boring, but the fact that it lasted for ten hours a day and very few people came throughout the week and hours drug by like years, and you get the point. It was a rough time.

Anyhow, Sunday I woke up with a sore throat and was absolutely exhausted. I managed to run to the fabric store, upload A Compilation of Small, Random Projects I did Around Christmas and New Years and January, and pass a quiz (with a 94%, but passing is still passing no matter how mediocre it is) that I’d attempted three times already. Apart from that I accomplished nothing, zilch, nada.

Regardless, I needed to get theses curtains done. I swapped my bright pink thread for black and zipped down the ends of the curtains. Once that was done, I put the pink thread back and finished sewing my mock-up together (minus the back panels as I had run out of cheap mock-up material).

The mock-up turned out pretty decent, but I was still nervous to cut into my fancy fabric.

So I made this bracelet because I had just watched Atlantis and wanted to remake Kida’s bracelet out of this giant earring I’d found in the airport on my Florida trip. The problem was her bracelet is made up of a pink center bead and smaller purple beads on either side, and try as I might, my bead collection just did not have such things. So I grabbed out these beads and decided to paint them the right colors, only I kind of liked how the bracelet looked like that and wasn’t committed to changing it (I still haven’t).

Having come to that second decisional impasse, I laid out my fabric.

Measured how long I wanted the skirt to be.

Confirmed my earlier suspicion that I hadn’t bought enough material.

Then cut out a skirt.

The top was laid out for display purposes only. I cut that out very differently.

I also cut out the tulle for the skirt, which was nearly impossible as you can barely see the stuff.

I then sewed the front three panels together.

Looking at the picture there are no seams in the front of the tulle. Instead it’s draped to have some fun pleating in the center.

I cut the tulle out along the top and flared it at the bottom to allow room for the pleats.

I then made identical, although see through, twins for each of the back pieces.

I’m not 100% sure why I flipped one the opposite direction. Dramatic effect I guess.

I then pinned and sewed those together.

The worst part was I couldn’t remember which sides were up and down because I’d gotten them all mixed up while cutting them out because they all looked too similar. That fact would later come back to haunt me.

To make the lace up part of the lace up back, I cut off this part of the fabric. I don’t really know what it’s called but it’s on any kind of material you buy.

I wanted to add some contrast to the back, since it would inevitably be boring, so I sewed this with the shiny side on the inside.

I also made way too much of it.

With that I snaked it down the sides of the top like so.

Somehow, I managed to come up with nine loops on each side even though I didn’t measure and both sides looked completely different.

Oh, I made this panel to go under the lace up back.

Since I lacked enough fabric to make a lining I just decided to use my mock up as the lining.

At this point time was running short.

Ah yes, the sides required about a billion pins. Remember, I have the ones holding the tulle in place, the ones holding the lace up loops in place, and finally, the ones holding the two parts together.

All-in-all a lot of pins. I ran out halfway through pinning the layers together and ended up sewing the top first, then going back and sewing the sides.

I flipped the whole thing right sides out, moved to the floor, and ironed everything flat.

After all that, I sewed a bunch of shortish strips together, sewed those into a tube, and flipped that whole tube to make a lace up.

Then tragedy struck.

Actually sorry, not yet.

First, I laid out the bodice, pinned the tulle on, adjusted the ruffles (oh yeah, I ruffled the tulle and the maid skirt somewhere back there and forgot to take pictures of it or something), pinned the underskirt on, adjusted those ruffles to fit, added a zipper to the skirt as there are obvious signs of one in the original picture, and basically finished the dress, minus sleeves and all the fancy bead work.

Then disaster struck.

Most of this occurred on Saturday evening. You'll remember Sunday at 6 is when I needed to have this thing ready to go. As such my goal was to have most of it all the way done so all I was left doing Sunday would be beading. I was right on track to accomplish that goal. Until I tried on the dress, and it was…

There aren’t really words.

Hideous maybe.

It’s like that moment when Dr. Frankenstien looked at the creature he’d created and was so revolted that he ran from the room in terror.

That about sums up the feeling I had when I saw this dress.

So out of shear frustration and exhaustion, I grabbed my scissors chopped the skirt from the bodice, reshaped the skirt, resewed the edges, hemmed it to trick my self into thinking I had actually finished it so I could sleep, and went to bed.

The next day, Sunday, I set to work again trying to figure out how to selvage this project.

To improve my mood, I put on an inspirational podcast and honestly it really helped.

I didn’t want to put a zipper in the skirt again because I hate sewing zippers in, but I needed a way for the skirt to fit my waist and still be able to fit over the rest of me. That led to adding elastic to the back half of the skirt so it would be fitted and also stretchy. Then I added pleats to the front to make it a perfect fit.

It looks a bit of a mess.

Honestly, it turned into a super cute skirt. Sort of vintage meets ball gown. I don’t know. I was torn between hating it and loving it and I couldn’t really decide.

That lead to the next challenge; I didn’t have enough fabric to make a whole new bodice and I didn’t know how to make the old one better.

But I figured it out, got the whole thing fitting better, not well but better than it was.

Then, I couldn’t figure out how to attach the darn thing to the bodice. I almost wanted to leave it in two pieces because I was starting to like the skirt so much (I was wearing it around pretty much the entire time I was altering the bodice).

The biggest problem was the elastic. In order for it to work the way I wanted it to it had to be allowed to retain it’s elastic nature. Sewing it to the bodice forced the entire garment to conform to the will of the bodice. Eventually though, I found a way around that.

I should also mention I was rushing like crazy during this whole last part because I had to be somewhere at 2pm, and there was a lot of deliberating and not a lot of sewing going on during this time.

Anyhow, here’s the grand reveal.

An old guy told me that I should be a model when I was taking pictures of my 1950s pink dress. I did my best to get some good model poses, but I still don’t think I have a shot at that gig. In the last picture I was trying to do an epic jump in the air and that was the best I got (I tried so many times). Yes, that is snow you see in the background. Yes, I am barefoot. Yes, the ground was very cold. Totally worth it though as I don’t have shoes that would have gone well with that dress and the sunset was perfect!

I’m not very happy with how this came out. I’m probably going to take it apart and redo the bodice with one of my favorite patterns so that it’ll look nice. I really just wanted to get something posted since last week I promised I would. It was also really good to have a deadline to work towards.

I know this was long and I wanted to take out all of the mess up parts and obviously the end result looks nothing like what I was going for, but that’s how it goes. Next time I’ll pick something a little less complicated to try making. I did likely throw myself into the deep end with this project.

Thanks for sticking around this long. Stay tuned for an update on this dress, but it probably won’t be fore a while because I really need to pack so I can move. I may at that point put that in it’s own blog post with my moving adventures of the past three years (not moving like emotional, but moving, like moving from one house to another).

P.S. I had very good intentions of getting this out on Sunday, but Sunday got really crazy and I didn’t have time to finish the dress much less write a post. Then I was going to do it on Monday since that was officially Valentine’s Day, but it was rainy and I still didn’t have finished pictures and as much fun as a rainy photo shoot sounds, I just didn’t really want to show this dress off in the rain.