I have to admit that at first I did not have any idea of what kind of dress I could make out of chiffon because I personally believe that this is a fabric that suits more to tops and shirts rather than dresses. For this reason I did some research on fashion designers that have worked with chiffon for dresses and I noticed that they mainly used gathering which gives a nice effect against the skin, on the fabric, and very often used many meters of chiffon in a loose form so that they take the movement of the fabric to their advantage.
After my research, I came out with the decision to make a romantic style dress and keeping simple lines( once I could not create much volume and shapes) but make a stylised dress.
I started with this pattern for the top of the dress which then I cut two pieces out of and used equal gathering on both center front lines. I matched the two pieces together by sewing a strip of lace in the middle.
Then I added the lower detail on the front of the top in another colour fabric and more lace for finishing on the top edge around the neck line.
For the back part of the top I wanted to continue with the same feature of gathering and emphasize on the top pack so I created a gathering that pointer to the the top center back. I then added the closing of the garment and I close hook-and- eye closure because this was the safest way to prevent the fabric from ripping apart(and it also increased the feeling of a romantic dress).
For the sleeves of I used this pattern which equals to the sleeve with gathering around the wrist and flat top.
When my top was finished, I looked at it and I thought that I wanted to keep the lower part really simple as the top was kind of more complicated. So what I did what taking a big piece of the fabric, turned it to double and sewed the ends around the waist, so there was no real finishing on the bottom which I found amazing!!! After that I thought to add an optional feature once more. I sewed to more strips of lace, as a continuing of the top two, on the inner side of the dress. I added two buttons on the outer surface and when I made two button holes on the ends of the two strips, I had a different design. So somebody can wear the the dress with the simple line skirt or with the one that is being created after you attached the buttons to the strips.
General comments about the garment:
I believe that the design of the dress was good and included many good ideas that could be worked int he future, but did not represent me as a designer very much as I was not really motivated to work with this fabric from the beginning on, and that reflected on the final outcome. This whole situation made the garment look very middle in my opinion, and the designer behind it look not that confident.
The top of the dress could be called fashion in my opinion, but if I would want to call the whole dress 'fashion' I would need to have a different skirt, one that would feet more to the design of the top, and I think that the whole dress should have been in a different colour like beige of white.
The main problem I faced which created a million other problems on the way, was the fabric its self! I did not enjoy working with chiffon at all, cause this fabric is so unstable, it is almost alive and makes choices for you, it is moving in other directions than the one s you want it to, and this makes both the cutting and the sewing process very difficult. Apart from that, it was fraying a lot and in this case I had to sew the lace up to three times because it was ripping of the chiffon all the time. And also, the fact that this fabric is so thin, makes is heavy in a weird way, fact that made my garment look wrongly measured.
One thing that I should improve for next weeks trousers, is the thread I use, because this time I was not that organized to chose the right thread colour, and that was very visible. I also should chose a fabric that suits more to my designs and style in order to created a garment I feel satisfied with.
For an opening I used hook-and-eye closure.
The fabric I used for this dress was silk chiffon, I used 3 meters for the making of it and it costed me 1,50 pounds per meter. The fabric was sourced for Hackney fabric warehouse.
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