Wedding Dresses (In which I struggle with Invisible Zippers)

J! and I have been to three weddings so far this year. A friend of mine from high school was married at the lovely Dana Power House in May, my younger brother Arrr! married his wonderful wife S in Kansas on June 14th, and we just celebrated T and Y's marriage two weeks ago in Malibu. We've still got one wedding to go: J!'s lovely sister M! is getting married on Nov. 1st in Massachusetts.

All these weddings meant lots of dressmaking. I don't wear dresses a lot, although I make quite a few of them. I don't wear dresses too often mostly because I work from home, and so changing out of my pjs is more or less optional. I guess I could have just made one dress and worn it four times, but that sounded rather boring. Plus, it would have given me fewer excuses to have J! drive me to the fabric store.

WD #1 was a bit of . . . . an experiment? I used Vogue 8085, which is a pattern I like very much. I'm not even going to discuss how I finally managed to get the zipper in place. This particular fabric was a bit unravelly, which didn't help, and the dress pattern doesn't include a lining, so I had to improvise. Improvising when learning to sew isn't exactly something I would recommend to others, but I find it very difficult to avoid. After all, if I'm going to all the trouble of making myself a dress, I want the finished product to be exactly* the way I imagine it. Anyway, as I've posted elsewhere, I've made other versions of Vogue 8085, so it should have been a cinch to add in a lining. Ha! It all eventually worked out, though, and here's the final version.

Wedding Dress #1. The ribbon on this dress definitely needs to perk up a bit.

Detail of the matching trim on the jacket sleeve. Last minute addition!

*Within reason, of course. For WD #1, I was happy that the dress ended up with an invisible zipper. Said zipper was not entirely "invisible" as such, but my cute little jacket neatly covered it up. Close enough.