Sewing Adventure

Many of my sewing projects tend to have long incubation periods.  For months, I've been contemplating what I wanted:  A long-sleeved, long, full dress.  I had the material sitting in my closet.  I just needed the perfect pattern.  I looked through patterns I already had, browsed the internet, flipped through the library's collection of sewing magazines.  I didn't really find what I wanted.  I didn't even really find something that was easily modifiable to become what I wanted.  I finally decided that I'd just have to make the pattern myself.

A dislaimer:  I've never really done this before.  I mean, I've somewhat modified existing patterns, but I've never really made a pattern from nothing.  And, as I got into it, I realized that I have a woeful lack of experience sewing anything with sleeves.  I mean, I've made tons of skirts, some pants, a fair amount of sleeveless sundresses.  But not so many things with sleeves.  I mean, if I had had a basic shirt pattern I liked, adding a skirt onto it would have been a cinch.  But, I didn't.

So, anyway, after hours of contemplating, some drawing, some sewing, and a few glitches along the way, here is the result.

I'm pretty happy with it, considering I really didn't know what I was doing.  But, before anybody gets too impressed, let me say that it doesn't look quite so good if I raise my arms.  It kind of does funny things, actually.  I'm assuming everyone out there has seen the movie Brave, right?  (OK, so not everyone has elementary-aged girls).  Well, let's just say that if I tried to shoot a bow an arrow in this dress the way she did in her dress of the same color, I would have the same problem.  So, it's almost exactly the dress I was dreaming of, just not quite.  In all fairness, I've tried on store-bought dresses that didn't work so much better than this, and I think I know what I'd have to modify to at least partially fix the problem.

I guess I'll just have to make another one.