The Great Gatsby Sewing Challenge

After weeks of working and giving up, I can finally make my dress public. A long dress would have been preferable, but I knew that in such case I would never ever wear this dress again. I’m 5’2 and long skirts don’t really flatter my figure, and I suppose I would not feel very comfortable with all that fabric around, and let’s be honest, I would feel completely in disguise. So something short, let’s be a flapper and let’s get it over with.

I had this golden fabric since longer than I can remember, 15 or 20 years more or less. It’s from the time my sister used to sew, and thought I could learn, I was a member to the Spanish Tolkien Society and I dreamed of making cool Elvish dresses for the annual convention. Pity that at that time traveling on my own was forbidden by our personal dictator, aka my father. That was long before he left and suddenly all hell broke loose, he got several girlfriends and we started a new life.

As I was saying, I had this fabric in my possession for many years and it was waiting its turn to become something. Perhaps due to its color and quantity it didn’t succeed before, but a brown lace fabric finally convinced me to make a dress of it. I followed Julia Bobbin’s tutorial to underline the lace with my old fabric, and I sweated through it, because the lace kept stretching all the time, making me fear that my dress will in the end look baggy.

I wanted to make the dress a bit longer, not long long, as I’ve said, but a bit longer to be a bit more faithful to the challenge, but I had a few issues that prevented me from achieving it. First, the golden fabric I used for the dress was all I d, not even one inch more. I thought of leaving the lace longer with a scalloped edge like this one, but the stretchy lace was uneven and I soon discovered that at the back the motif was upside-down (ups!). Luckily it cannot be appreciated over the golden fabric.

And you, do you have your dress ready for the challenge?