My Christmas Dress!

This year I have seen so many awesome Christmas dresses on the sewing blogs I follow. As a lover of whimsy, novelty and all things festive, of course I wanted in on the action and started planning my perfect Christmas dress.

I like the idea of making this a tradition: making a new Christmas dress each year to wear on Christmas Day. Of course my planning for this first dress began by making a Christmas Dress board on Pinterest and pinning loads of ideas. I already had the notion that I'd like to pair my Christmas Dress with a red cardigan and tights, so I had already pretty much narrowed it down to a green or pale blue fabric for the dress. These were the six fabrics I fell in love with:

Narrowing it down (clockwise from top left):   Winter Novelty Gingerbread House by Benartex, Makower Festive Trees, Dashwood Christmas Dreams Bauble, Makower Wonderland Skaters, Dashwood Winter Wonderland Mistletoe, Makower Wonderland Baubles.

Although I love all of these fabrics, the mistletoe print by Dashwood Studios was the one I kept coming back to. I know it is very Christmassy, but it's a bit more subtle than the giant baubles, for instance, so I figured it might be a bit more winter-round wearable?!

Fabric close-up. Mistletoe, from Dashwood Studios Winter Wonderland collection

I did a bit of price comparison, and in the end bought it from The Fabric Fox. I had never ordered from them before, but they were the cheapest UK supplier I could find. I have to say the service was top notch, and the delivery fast, so I would happily recommend them.

Anyway, here's the dress!

Head to Mistletoe dress (B4443 in Dashwood Studio's Mistletoe fabric)

That is the one and only picture I got of my dress on the day itself - bad blogger! So the rest are shots I took of it this afternoon to better show the dress off.

I loved wearing the dress on Christmas Day. I felt very elf-like. Shout out to Cassie for the stripey-tights inspiration! I'm so sad that I had to throw out those green shoes before the end of the day. So sad. They are at least 12 years old, and the inners had just completely disintegrated. They were beyond saving so sadly they had to go. Boo!

I ended up cutting the dress out up North while visiting our family, and sewing it up on Christmas Eve at home. Since I'd left it so late I decided to make a TNT pattern that I knew would be pretty simple. I went for yet another B4443 because I love how comfy the bodice is (hooray for princess seams), and a skirt with no pleats or gathers seemed like it would save time. I knew I'd wear this dress with a cardigan, so I decided to make it sleeveless, and went with the V neck this time.

I fully lined it with cotton lawn, although in retrospect it might not have been necessary to line the skirt. No pattern matching because of the very busy novelty print, machine sewn hem for speed, white invisible zip because apparently a green one is very hard to find. At least at the very last minute!

Not sure what that fitting issue is with the pulling from the shoulders?!

It's weird. I love love love the silhouette of my Rock Around the Clock dress on me, which is the same V neck as this but with little sleeves. AND I love the boat neck version I made which is sleeveless. But I DON'T love this shape: V neck and sleeveless. It doesn't make sense but it's undeniable, it doesn't really suit me. Oh well, as I said I will always wear this dress with a cardigan anyway, so it makes no difference really. And now I know. Knowledge is power and all that.

Much better with a cardigan!

Well, that's the blog all caught up with my recent makes! My scrappy quilt is still on the go, and I have a few more projects in the pipeline which I'm quite excited about. Even more exciting is the fact that I hadn't realised today is a Bank Holiday! Now that I've discovered it is, I can spend the day sewing! It would be TOO MUCH of a shame to spend a Bank Holiday doing my tax return, right?

Until next time! x