Ivory Silk Cocktail Dress

Pub­lished 07/19/2013

Pat­tern: Vogue 8848

Mate­ri­als:

1 yard of Twill Silk

1/2 of Silk Charmeuse (I found it on super Clearance!)

1- 18″ White Invis­i­ble Zipper

3 yards of Inter­fac­ing (20″ wide)

1 1/2 yards Lin­ing fabric

Wash­able Mark­ing Pen

Sewing Machine & Scissors

Silk Cocktail Dress

I fell in love with this silk twill fab­ric! I chose this pat­tern because 1) it had a fuller skirt and required very lit­tle fab­ric 2) And I want­ed to see how this low waist­ed dress would look like! I real­ly was­n’t sure how it would look like since there was­n’t pic­tures of live mod­els on the cov­er, but rather illustrations.

I mis­tak­en­ly did NOT do a mock-up to test the fit of the dress! I did­n’t have time to spend on this project and want­ed to make it quick­ly! That was not a smart idea! The dress orig­i­nal­ly looked awful on me! The fab­ric at the bodice pulled in dif­fer­ent direc­tions and clear­ly did not fit me at all! I end­ed up hav­ing to seam rip out the entire dress and repat­tern and cut the pieces I had. It was a bit frus­trat­ing, but for­tu­nate­ly after a few more fit­tings and repat­terns- I made it work!

TIPS on cut­ting silk:

Using a trac­ing wheel, trace the com­mer­cial tis­sue pat­tern onto thick  con­struc­tion paper or poster paper (I snatched up old posters from a com­pa­ny get­ting rid of their old posters.)

Then, flat­ten the silk on a tabl
e and trace the pat­tern on (one lay­er) of the silk using an erasable mark­ing pen. Weight down the pat­tern with weights.  (I received the above mark­ing pen from Kol­lab­o­ra and it works great! I think it is Dritz brand.)