A Dress for my Birthday | McCall’s M8195

Things used :

This dress was heavily inspired by *this one by La Femme en Noir* that I’ve had my eye on since forever but never been able to afford the postage to get it all the way to New Zealand. That’s when I remembered that I have sewing skills and *audacity.

*Note: This audacity will come back to bite me in the butt.

I found the only green stretch velvet that my local sewing store had, I wish it had been more of a forest green rather than a teal but it’s literally all I had to work with. I chose to line it with a green knit and found the perfect eyelash lace at the Emporium.

The pattern I chose to use as the base, McCall’s M8195, was almost perfect. The bodice of the dress was spot on, I would only need to change out the sleeves and make the skirt longer and fuller.

So I started off making the bust of the dress as the pattern called for, making sure to swap out my needle on my machine to a stretch needle and I was away! So far so good.

Initially, I tried making cap sleeves which I sourced from another pattern entirely but for the life of me, couldn’t figure out how to insert them in to the straps of the dress so I abandoned that idea quite quickly. Instead, I used the pattern for the flutter sleeves that had some with the dress and ended up cutting 11cm from the bottom.

To finish the top edge of the sleeves it called for bias tape. I didn’t have any in my stash in the right color and I didn’t want to go back to the craft store so I used twill tape instead and it worked fine.

After the sleeves had been fitted in, I finished up the bodice by adding the eyelash lace to the bust (my favourite detail), and sewing in the lining.

Next I worked on the skirt. I thought the pattern pieces they provided for the pockets were laughably small so I swapped them out for much deeper pockets. For the skirt, I borrowed the pattern pieces from one of my favorites – Butter B5748. I chose this because it’s knee length and a full circle, my personal preference for vintage style skirts and dresses. It fitted to the waist of the bodice with ease. I sewed the waist using a small zigzag stitch so that part of the dress could maintain it’s stretch.

With that, the dress was finished. I love how it turned out, I think it looks just like the La Femme en Noir one, however and it’s a BIG however, it’s at least four sizes too big. And I know what you’re saying “Why didn’t you make a mock up first?!” A couple of reasons –

1. Remember how I mentioned audacity earlier? Well this is the big factor here. I’ve made plenty of dresses by McCall’s before to the point where I’ve not done a mock up for them in the longest time because they’re usually spot on with their sizing on the packet. I got cocky. I assumed that with the stretch fabric, I should make it one size smaller than I usually would. Realistically, I should have made it four sizes smaller.
2. Speaking of mock ups, to make one that would have been a true to stretch version of my velvet, I would have had to of made it in, you guessed it, the stretch velvet. So for all intents and purposes, you could say this version is the mock up.

Because I can see the vision of this dress if it were to fit properly, I do think I’ll make another in the future. It has the potential to be stunning!

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Difficulty : ** a beginner friendly pattern
Time : 4 hours, not including the time I took to make the first sleeves that I ended up binning.