This is a straight-up midi length Anna made from a viscose challis. I saw it in a recommended fabrics list for some indie pattern or other and bought two and a half metres of it immediately, even though I had no idea what I was going to do with it and really don't like buying fabric online without having seen it in person first. I wanted my very own rainbow dress, dammit.
Initially construction was as straightforward as it usually is. I've got the size and FBA of my Anna bodice to the place I like them, so I just cut it out and whipped it together. The one difference is that I made bias binding for the neckline out of remnants of the fabric, since I didn't think cotton bias would work visually or structurally. I think it's come out basically OK, but it was a complete bitch to do and I hated it all, from the making of the bias tape to sewing it on, and I normally quite like sewing bias tape. I'm in no rush to do this again, put it that way.
I had the dress finished weeks before the wedding I went to in June, but as I said in that post, it managed to distort itself very strangely and I didn't want to risk trying to fix something I didn't know could be fixed. When I decided to wear it to the July wedding instead, the pressure was off a bit more - if it didn't work, I could just wear the blue one again. There was zero overlap between the guests at both weddings, so nobody would ever know.
The main problem with the dress was that there was suddenly a ton of excess fabric at the back, which was standing up away from my shoulder blades and making me look as though I had a severe hunch. I took that out the simplest way I could think of - taking the whole dress up at the shoulders. I took out maybe an inch, which has solved most of the problems with the back. Ideally I would have taken it in at an angle so the neckline could have stayed the same, but I couldn't work out a way to do that without taking off and redoing my bias binding, and given what a pain in the backside this self-made bias tape was, I was not going to be doing that if I could help it. So I just dealt with the slight neckline change, which doesn't bother me too much.
For the wedding I wore this dress with the same feather explosion hat as last time and nude shoes, which I am not putting on again for these photos because they're still not broken in properly and haven't adjusted to my weird-shaped feet yet. I waited more than ten hours for the disco and then couldn't dance for very long because the bones below my little toes were screaming. I hear that some people can just put on whatever pair of shoes they like and walk around without their feet cursing them into oblivion. I envy those people. My feet suck.
I'm glad I was able to fix this. Like my other wedding guest dress, this one will be a good all-purpose occasion dress, bringing my total number of occasion dresses to two. I don't want to get too carried away with making things like this, but we do go to a fair few nice places and one or two more dressy things wouldn't hurt. I'm not prioritising it, but I am lifting my ban temporarily.
This face? Could not explain to you if I tried.
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