Birthday Dress 2017

Okay, this dress is only about a year and a month old… That’s not too bad, right?

Starting in 2016 I decided I’d make myself a special dress around my birthday, and it’s never been quite a standard dress. Meaning, I don’t plan on just taking a straightforward pattern and making it…

In 2016, I was still working out some pattern-hacking, and I made a sleeveless Nettie dress, with a handkerchief hem, out of a lovely slinky knit that looks like black lace on a green background.

Last year (2017) I went a different route, and decided to try my hand at dyeing fabrics. I read up on fabric-dyeing and decided to buy a 10 yard cut of this lovely rayon lawn. Now… I didn’t really read the description, so I didn’t quite process that it wasn’t really meant for garments. Word to the wise, its very thin, shows nearly every line underneath, and tears fairly easily. I’m sure for its intended purpose (linings and undergarments and draperies and such) it works well… I haven’t quite gotten to use it for those yet.

No, I wanted to use it to make a dress.

Specifically the dress outlined in a post on DaughterFish’s website called the Future Dress. (Unfortunately it looks like the DaughterFish website is down, so I can’t link it.)

If I remember correctly, this future dress is originally the creation of a designer in the earlier 20th century, and is so simple in its ingenuity. Basically, *you take three shapes (two trapezoids and a triangle), to make a huge triangle and then repeat from * until you’ve got four huuuuuge triangles, which make up the neckline and armscyes. The dress is loose and flowy until you belt it, and then there’s a cute amount of volume emanating from the belted area.

I chose to keep the shape of the four triangles post bias hanging, rather than cutting it off around my knees. Last spring I was trying to think over life choices, and I didn’t want to spend extra brainpower figuring out how best to hem it, so I left it raw and uncut.

My memories are telling me that I waited until after I made the dress to dye the fabric, which is not always recommended. I chose to use Emerald Green Procion dye, without the add ons used to keep the emerald super vibrant. It worked, overall, and I ended up with a very pastel spring-y dress. Not what I wanted, but pleasant enough for a birthday.

The favorite comment I got on my birthday (since I foolishly forgot to tell my employers I wanted to take off), was that I looked like a fairy. Which I will always take as a compliment.

A couple months later I ended up dyeing another project a lovely Royal Blue, and decided to over-dye a bit, and ombre dye a bit as well, to give it the darker look I craved. And that’s how you see it today!

I like this dress, and I’m curious how it’d look with a bit more opacity to the fabric and with perhaps a weightier fabric, since this fabric floats like a very heavy feather. But it takes soooo much fabric, that it’d have to be a sale fabric and kismet… But maybe one day!