I met Jimi­ta last year because of my sewing skills!

I met her when my friend invit­ed me to join the Junior League Hol­i­day Ball Com­mit­tee (which Jimi­ta was a mem­ber of). Basi­cal­ly my role as a com­mit­tee mem­ber was to help dec­o­rate and sew the table­cloths for the cock­tail tables at the din­ner event. 

Dur­ing our last Hol­i­day Ball Com­mit­tee meet­ing, Jimi­ta asked me to make her dress for her daughter’s wed­ding in April. I was hon­ored and even ner­vous to be asked to do this project for such a big day!  But with Jimita’s ener­gy, coop­er­a­tion and encour­age­ment, I was able to deliv­er the dress she wanted!

We didn’t have much time before the wed­ding, so Jimi­ta chose pat­terns for me to use or refer to for guid­ance. For her dress we used Vogue 1242 (Designed by Kay Unger New York).

 Pat­terns run small and usu­al­ly require peo­ple to make their own adjustments.

For this pat­tern, I had to grade out each pat­tern piece of the dress. Orig­i­nal­ly I thought it wouldn’t be hard. How­ev­er after I start­ed trans­fer­ring the pieces and grad­ing them out, I real­ized it was going to be trick­i­er than I had antic­i­pat­ed. This was because the bodice front and back con­sist­ed of mul­ti­ple asym­met­ri­cal pieces.

 After grad­ing out the pat­tern, I cre­at­ed a mock-up to test the fit on Jimita.

I end­ed up tak­ing the dress in quite a bit in the shoul­ders and waist.

So again, I went back to the draft­ing table to adjust the pat­tern. But the sec­ond time was much eas­i­er to adjust the pattern!

Jimi­ta and I searched all over for fab­ric. We orig­i­nal­ly want­ed to use a light pink silk wool fab­ric for the dress and bro­cade fab­ric for the jack­et, but ulti­mate­ly Jimi­ta found a sil­very light blue mid­weight cotton/polyester at our local fab­ric store. (The fab­rics we loved at first were expen­sive!)   Ulti­mate­ly, the sil­ver col­or was very nice and looked beau­ti­ful on Jimita!

The fab­ric did not have any stretch or much drape so the fit had to be perfect!

Before insert­ing the zip­per, I had Jimi­ta come by and fit the dress so that I could mark the zip­per inser­tion. Dur­ing this time, I noticed that the fab­ric above the chest was bub­bling up (almost like a cowl). To solve the prob­lem, I tried to pinch the straps at the top and make them tighter, but it wasn’t elim­i­nat­ing the slack and made the arm­holes tight.

I didn’t know where I went wrong in the pat­tern and was con­cerned and puz­zled as to how I was going to fix the slack in the chest.

For­tu­nate­ly, I was able to get some tips and point­ers from my mom!

(My grand­moth­er was a expert seam­stress and passed on bits of sewing knowl­edge to my mom.)

My mom asked to see the com­mer­cial pat­tern. She point­ed out to me that the com­mer­cial pat­tern straps extend­ed out on the shoul­ders and noticed that Jimita’s shoul­ders were very nar­row. If this was the case, then the straps on Jimita’s dress were pat­terned to extend wider than where she was plac­ing them on her shoulders.

So, I repat­terned the front bodice one more time, then sewed the new front bodice, insert­ed the zip­per & sewed in the lining.

The Jack­et and Shawl:

For Jimita’s jack­et, I used a Bur­da Pat­tern 02/2013 #138 and the same sil­ver fab­ric as the Vogue dress. Like the dress, I made a mock-up and had Jimi­ta test fit it. As I said ear­li­er in the blog, Jimita’s shoul­ders are nar­row, so after the fit­ting I read­just­ed the shoul­ders of the pattern.

 I also short­ened the sleeves to ¾’s.

Over­all, the sewing for the jack­et and shawl went smooth­ly and the jack­et looked absolute­ly stun­ning on her!

For both the lin­ing and the shawl, I used a sheer sil­very blue poly­ester fab­ric. This fab­ric had a very sub­tle pais­ley design, which added a flash of detail to the jack­et and outfit.

Thank you Jimi­ta for com­mis­sion­ing me on your daugh­ter’s big day!

And thank you to Josephiney Pho­tog­ra­phy for the photos!