A Hint of Fairy Tale

Oh, look--another layer cake dress

  

This dress is a lot shorter than other two layer cake dresses I've made so far, by about 7"

 

Since I roughly followed the previous dresses' rough (very rough) tier widths of 90", 130", 180", and 220", but with the shorter length, this dress's ridiculous fullness is even more exaggerated.

I'm still having fun with visible facings and bias binding on the neckline, although the bias binding, being made from solid fabric, is not so flashy this time.  I didn't even make the bias binding specifically for this, it was something I had made in the past, with the continuous method...and it was from the end of it where there are a lot more joins, so there are several seams around the neckline, in addition to the seam in back where the ends for this project are.  They're all pretty hard to see, and harder to photograph, so no problem.

The black, white, and pink squiggle print reminded me of rick rack, so I did what I almost never do, and decided to use rick rack in this project.  I had a small amount of a vintage black and white rick rack, so I tucked that under the pressed outer edge of the visible facing.  I like how it becomes subtle when this floral print is the background.

The sleeve bands are rectangles cut on the grain.  They're a little narrower than my sleeve bands usually are, because I used fabric strips I found in my small yardage stash, instead of cutting anything specific.

I applied them in the usual "sew to the wrong side and flip to the front where they get edge stitched" way.

Of course there are pockets.  I have a lot of that black/white/pink print.

I've had that black/white/pink print for years, thrifting it back before I documented every piece of fabric I'd bring home (it's visible on a shelf picture from 2015.)  I always thought I'd make it into a long sleeve button up shirt, but I hesitated because I fully expect I will stain anything white I try to wear, then I made enough of those shirts to know it would be a bit heavy for that.  Now that I've used it for this, I suspect there's at least a little polyester in it, which isn't optimum for me and a shirt, either.

Its potential polyester nature made me wary of using the sewing gadgets on it, and, indeed, it resisted the ruffler, and had one section that absolutely refused to cooperate with the hem roller.  I used the hem roller as much as possible, and hand rolled that one section.  The print was on-grain, so I could use it to judge where things should be while hand rolling.

 

I did misjudge what thread color to use--I figured that white would be best, since the print is 50% white, but, nope!  Should've been black.  I feel like the line of white thread calls back to the stereotype of rick rack, so it's fine.

I gathered and sewed the tiers with the tex 24 thread, and serged every seam.  The thread in the serger is still brown, but it looks fine, inside where no-one will see. 

No surprised on the back

The previous two layer cake dresses are very autumn-coded (well, one has Halloween prints, so that's a little more than 'coded'), and I knew I wanted to eventually make at least one that would work for spring and summer.  I hadn't initially planned for this to be that dress--in fact, I had planned this bodice fabric to make the previous dress, but the contrast fabrics I'd chosen, as mentioned, didn't mesh well with this floral fabric--then, when I was ready to work on this dress, I discovered that there was absolutely not enough of this floral to make the skirt in anything near the style of the previous dress.  So!  Time to rip lots of things into strips!  I think it's fun.