It's been a while! I have been busy with finishing off college work, ill health, lack of motivation, and just generally lacking in energy to do sewing. However, among all that wallowing in self-pity, I have been slowly plodding on with this dress with my grandmother - mainly because I set myself a deadline.
I bought the fabric a while ago in London, yet I've only just started using it for an ensemble planned for a Lolita cinema trip meetup, to see Alice and the Looking Glass. I've made an Alice bow - naturally :) - from the same material, to go with the dress. The lace comes from an adorable haberdashery in York that I came across, so this dress contains holiday memories as well as my love for Alice in Wonderland!
The pattern for this came from Otome no Sewing book 2, the "Frames" JSK, which I adapted to fit myself using the slicing method of making a pattern bigger. I traced the pattern pieces to the largest size, working out how I should multiply the measurements to get my size - luckily enough, I only had to separate each strip of pattern piece by a centimeter each time - and put the bodice pieces together by laying them out on the paper and tracing around them to make one bodice piece. I measured the inch for each strip and drew a line upwards with a ruler, and cut the pattern piece into strips. I then cut around the enlarged pattern, adding a centimeter at the bottom of the pattern also.
This is very hard to explain, and I suppose a photograph would do better at explaining it, however I was too excited to take photos at this stage and forgot.
As it was in Japanese I had to do some translating to find out what the miscellaneous, non-obvious pieces were. This made things slightly more difficult, but I battled on. After all, the illustrations in Otome no Sewing were very clear and concise, so I could pretty much guess what the Japanese said when it came to making the thing.
The actual making of the thing was quite straightforward, though in some places we had to improvise where the instructions (or my lack of Japanese) were limited, such as with the shirring in the back and pleating instead of gathering the skirt; I find that pleats look better on me, and I always manage to mess up the gathering somehow anyway in the first go. :)
I'm pleased with the results despite how long it took to piece together.
