School Formal Dress Toile #2


Here's the next stage of Gabby's formal dress in the making!

After sewing this first toile in calico and fitting it onto the body, I then made the style and fit changes to the original pattern. I eliminated the deep dart at the waist and instead created a princess seam through the bodice, this way I eliminated the excess fabric at the raglan sleeve edge and through the bust and waist area to get a better fit and importantly avoided any pointy darts. As usual the centre back had to be altered at the waistline to allow for G's sway back

The base fabric of the final dress will be in a stunning 100% silk faille which is a heavier and drapier silk and very different to calico, so to recheck the fit again and before I cut into the final fabric (yikes!) I needed to test out the new altered pattern in a silk faille as well, unfortunately I had no other fabric I could find with the same drape and weight for this. This black faille dress won't be wasted, I plan to alter and finish this second toile off for another simpler version of the final dress. Lucky girl will end up with two dresses!

For the raglan sleeves I used silk georgette. In hindsight I should have used organza like I did in the first toile, silk georgette didn't work as well in the raglan sleeve due to it stretching in parts but I know that the final fabric has more stability and hold than a georgette so I'll ignore any fitting issue there. For the skirt part of the dress I drafted a 3/4 circle skirt using the circle skirt calculator on The Snugbug (very clever!).


It definitely was worth all the effort to recut the dress in the silk faille, as you can see the dress needs yet more fitting and adjustments as this weight of silk gives quite a bit, but I'm very excited and ready for the final dress, I hope she is!

In the final post I'll include the dress pattern used as well as the inspiration dresses we found on Pinterest.

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