Ukrainian Embroidered Lace Dress

Khrys­tos Voskres! Christ is risen!

Phew! Lent is over and true to tra­di­tion; I bare­ly fin­ished my annu­al East­er dress for East­er Mass.

Every year at this time, I design and sew a Ukrain­ian inspired East­er dress. This year, I had trou­ble choos­ing between 4 dress designs. So by the time I nailed down a design and start­ed the embroi­dery, it was already half way through Lent.

Blue Ukrainian Embroidered Dress

A cou­ple weeks ago when I real­ized there was no way I would be able to fin­ish the embroi­dery before East­er, I dug through my mom’s box of embroi­dery she received from my babcha. In the box, I found some beau­ti­ful bright blue and pur­ple men’s shirt embroi­dery from Ukraine.

You would think it would be easy for me once I had the embroi­dery. But unfor­tu­nate­ly, this made the design process hard­er! It was hard to fig­ure out a com­bi­na­tion of fab­ric, col­or, embroi­dery, design, and fit that worked together.

I’m embar­rassed to admit that I was like­ly in more pain Fri­day night try­ing to come up with an East­er dress design, than my sis­ter who was hav­ing labor contractions.

I final­ly nailed down the design the day before East­er. It was right in front of me and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it soon­er!! I decid­ed to use Bur­dastyle 02/2015 #129 Dress pat­tern (size 36). 

I start­ed embroi­der­ing a Bur­dastyle #123 linen dress last spring, so I already had the dress pieces cut. (I had to cut some new pieces since a few of the orig­i­nals had embroi­dery start­ed on them.)

This pat­tern turned out to be per­fect! It was both a design I was itch­ing to make for myself, and it incor­po­rat­ed most of my embroi­dery design ideas! It also allowed me to put a fem­i­nine & mod­ern spin on the Ukrain­ian men’s shirt and use all the embroi­dery pieces with­out cut­ting them!

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I made a cou­ple changes to the pattern. 

I added the back invis­i­ble zip­per to make the head open­ing larg­er. This pre­vents me from get­ting make-up on the dress when dress­ing and undress­ing..

The dress looked a lit­tle shape­less and boxy on me, so I added the back gath­er­ing and belt. It also looks less like a Ukrain­ian men’s vest­ment with the gath­ered back waistline.

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Over­all, I am very hap­py with the dress! It very much reflects my style and taste. I don’t think I could’ve come up with a bet­ter dress with the time I had to spare and mate­ri­als I had in stock.

Even­tu­al­ly, I will fin­ish the oth­er planned dress design and (maybe) post about it on the blog. It will be inter­est­ing to com­pare the two projects!

I hope you had a nice East­er! Enjoy spring!!

 

Here are work in progress photos. 

Thanks again to the fam­i­ly & friends who gave me late night East­er Vig­il feedback/suggestions! You’re the best!!