A Vintage Easter Dress

This is my vintage inspired Easter dress. I've never sewn myself anything this involved before so I am thrilled that it turned out this well. It's almost exactly like I envisioned. I started with a modern pattern, McCall's 6599 from the Fashion Star line, but I made changes, of course. I shortened the sleeves even more and changed the smallish (quarter maybe) circle skirt to a full gathered and color blocked skirt. I added the belt with 4 yellow buttons on my own too. It seemed too plain without it.

The princess seams provide a great opportunity for color-blocking on the bodice. When I found this double-sided fabric at Joann's back in February, I had this vision right away, even before knowing about the vintage challenge at Challenge Create - Adult Edition at Skirtfixation. After searching the internet for more inspiration, I felt like a full gathered skirt would be more fitting with the 50's to 60's era. It also made it a lot less stressful to make the color-blocking changes to the skirt without having to be so exact.

I think I have a thing for gray lately. My skirt last week was gray, this dress is gray, (I'm sitting on our new gray sofa), and last night I sewed myself another gray skirt and top!! What is up with that? Something to do with the never-ending winter around here maybe?

So to combat the gray-ness, we went down to our local beach to try to take pictures but the wind was too strong and the light was too harsh. I had bribed my 14 year old son (home on spring break) to take pictures of his mom out in public wearing her June Cleaver dress. Heehee. It cost me $8.46 at Wendy's to get no usable pictures. Arrrrg.

Back home with my lousy 12 year old point and shoot camera and it's timer, I was able to get some pictures of the details.

My nearly invisible zipper

Cap sleeves.

Machine stitched blind hem and buttoned belt

I can't remember being this excited about an Easter Dress since I was a little kid. I have been trying like to crazy to finish up this post so I can focus more on Holy Week. See you next week and have a blessed Easter!! Alleluia!!

P.S. Voting is now open if you want to follow this link and scroll all the way down to vote for me!??