Poppies Sigma-Flora
Pattern: Sleeveless bodice hack of the Sigma dress by Papercut Patterns with the skirt from the Flora Dress by By Hand London
Fabric: Cotton lawn from Mood Fabrics
Sewn Up: Spring 2023
This past June, I had three consecutive wedding weekends! I knew I wanted to mark the moments by sewing up some dresses.
The first was the wedding of my dear friend Kat. We met at book arts camp in 2016 and have remained close thanks to sharing feelings and art projects over Marco Polo ever since. Her wedding to Neil was in a beautiful red Vermont barn, with paper flower lanterns strung all along the rafters, the greenest, leafiest trees outside, and a blues band that played late into the night. I wanted a dress that would feel at home in this setting. (Spoiler: that is the dress this post is about!)
The second was the wedding of my brother Alex and now sister-in-law Cassandra, where I had an extra special job to perform: I was the officiant! It was so exciting and felt like the most important speaking gig I will probably ever have. The wedding was formal, which I learned from googling basically means it needs to be long! Outside of my floor-length choir dress that I always feel very witchy and out of my element in, my default hem length is mini. How was I going to make a long dress I felt like myself in, and how do you make a dress look fancy? These were the questions I would need to answer for wedding #2.
The third wedding was my other dear friend Shoshana's. We were roommates in our twenties and had a living room band where we'd sing folksy duet versions of Donovan and Robyn songs. Her wedding to Mark involved a weekend of glamping in a magical Pennsylvania forest, and we were all invited to come in whatever would make us feel most comfortable, whether that was sequins or sneakers.
While I had aspirations to make three dresses, I ran out of time due to an abundance of concurrent wedding-adjacent creative projects! At the time I was also writing my brother’s wedding ceremony, training for a bachelor/ette bike trip from Burlington to Montreal, screen printing team T-shirts for the bike trip, and attempting to be a sewing superhero by helping troubleshoot a last-minute tricky wedding bustle on Shoshana’s 5-layer tulle gown (some real highs and lows on that project, ending up with the high of passing it off to a professional!).
Looking back on the race-to-the-finish that was this past May, I am thrilled with myself for producing two dresses. This one was my first sew, meant for wedding #1 (I ultimately wore it to wedding #3 too) and also to test out the pattern and fit for the more formal wedding #2.
Floor-length really doesn't suit me, so my answer to a black-tie dress code was a high-low hem. I lengthened the skirt of the Flora dress to hit my mid-calf in the front, ankles in the back. And my answer to formal-ing up the dress was…underlining! My sister, who has taken all of Brooks Ann Camper's classes, has been recommending underlining to me forever, assuring me that it is a surefire way to make it look, as Nina Garcia always says on Project Runway, "more expensive." What that really means is that the garment has more structure and and is less prone to wrinkles, and on the other side of this wedding season I am a total convert.
If you look closely you can see all the hand-basting that underlining requires - around every seam just inside the seam allowance.
This light yellow poppy-covered cotton lawn was a bit sheer, so underlining with a pale green voile also helped with that, and brightened up the colors of the print. The basic flow of events was muslining the top twice for fit, underlining and lining the bodice, underlining and lining the skirt. Because a circle skirt uses a lot of fabric, I did some creative pattern piecing to get the width I needed.
Floor shot of my adjusted pattern and the overhang I needed to make up for with piecing
It's always fun to learn something new especially while working with a really pretty fabric, so even though this was a dress of many steps (underlining involves a lot of hand basting), I really enjoyed the process. I got most of it done before I left for Vermont, with just some finishing left to do.
The morning of wedding #1 I finished up hand stitching in the lining and catch-stitching the hem from my bed at the Hampton Inn – thank goodness for hotel room ironing boards!
The dress felt perfect for both the barn and glamping weddings: so festive, yet so comfortable in the cotton, and with a lot of dance floor twirl. And, not a new lesson, but a reminder of an old one: how sewing something for an occasion makes the occasion last longer, both before, while sewing, and after, through the memories it holds. Designing and sewing this dress expanded my experience of celebrating these important milestones in my loved ones' journeys.
Sewing this also gave me the confidence that I would in fact be able to make it a formal friend to wear to my brother's wedding the following weekend. That post is coming up next!
~ Photos by my Dad so very patiently on a very humid summer afternoon.
Drawing process reel: Floor photo, pencil sketch, digital drawing.
