Blush Silk Wool Dress

Pub­lished 6/23/2014

How many times have you gone shop­ping for that spe­cial dress and instead of find­ing the per­fect dress, you find mul­ti­ple dress­es wish­ing you could blend them all into one.
Meet Lisa (then) bride-to-be that faced this dilemma.

 When we met in May, she brought over sev­er­al white dress­es. Each dress had a fea­ture she want­ed, such as fab­ric, gath­ered skirt, skirt length, etc. But none of them were quite what she was look­ing for. Lisa wasn’t look­ing for any­thing over the top. In fact, her design was quite sim­ple. She want­ed a fit­ted bodice, gath­ered skirt, and mod­est neck­line and hem. And as strange as it might seem, it’s tough to find these sim­ple & chic dress­es made with fine fab­rics in stores.

We pro­ceed­ed to design the dress and choose the fabric!

I like­ly over­whelmed Lisa when I eager­ly showed her all my fab­ric swatch­es and samples! 🙂

After dis­cussing the dif­fer­ent options, Lisa chose a blush silk & wool fab­ric. This fab­ric was an expen­sive choice, but oh so beautiful!

It is spe­cial to order a cus­tom-made gar­ment for one’s self, but it is even more unique when it’s sewn with beau­ti­ful fab­rics. (Fab­rics rarely found in retail stores.) So when I’m mak­ing a cus­tom-made gar­ment, I sug­gest that the cus­tomer opt for the unusual.

Here is an exam­ple of how much blush silk & wool dress­es cost off the rack:  March­esa dress and  Lela Rose dress.

From the mea­sure­ments I took of Lisa dur­ing our first meet­ing, I cre­at­ed a cus­tom (self draft­ed) dress pattern.

Below is a pho­to of her first (and only) muslin mock-up. The mock-up fit well, but we chose to make some adjust­ments. I took in the under bust at the front darts, moved the shoul­der seams for­ward, straight­ened the side seams, marked the neck­line (front and back), and loos­ened the armholes.

Orig­i­nal­ly, I was not going to line the skirt. (One of the rea­sons why Lisa chose the silk/wool was that the skirt would­n’t need lin­ing.) After sewing and gath­er­ing the skirt piece, I wrapped the skirt around my waist to see how the gath­er­ing looked. As I did this, I could see the dark­ened side seams when the sun shined through the skirt. The skirt was­n’t trans­par­ent, but it was light enough to see the seam edges. This does­n’t ‘seam’ (pun intend­ed) like a big deal, but it is if it’s dis­tract­ing. (And it was dis­tract­ing to me!) As a result, I serged the skirt seams and lined the skirt with a silk/cotton fabric.

I lined the top with the blush silk & wool fab­ric and a cream-col­ored silk charmeuse.

Lisa asked if I would add extra fab­ric to the side seams, back seams, and hem, so that she could make adjust­ments to the dress if her sis­ter want­ed to wear the dress in the future.

Again, I pulled out the but­ton stash my friend gave me! This time I searched for the right but­ton for the back of Lisa’s dress.

We end­ed up choos­ing a sim­ple pearl button.

Here’s a pho­to from Lisa’s final fit­ting! Every­thing fit well and all I need­ed to do was hem the dress!

Not only is this blush col­or very pret­ty, but Lisa could eas­i­ly wear the dress again to anoth­er wed­ding or work relat­ed events.

If worn with oth­er acces­sories, the fab­ric looks more pink than beige.

Rehearsal pho­tos tak­en by Pho­tog­ra­phy by Anas­tas­sia! Thanks Tess!

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Thank you & congrats Lisa and Jake!

Read about more about oth­er silk wool dresses