I heart Star Wars dress

This summer I picked up a piece of Star Wars knit fabric in the fabric store in Mora. It wasn't enough to make a whole dress, so I also picked up some solid navy knit fabric to go with it. This week I felt it was time to make something out of them.

The boring thing with making clothes is to cut out the pattern and then the fabric. By now though I have a standard pattern that I can then tweak to make different dresses. My standard pattern was picked up many years ago from the sewing magazine Ottobre. It is made for a woven fabric, but if I make it in a knit fabric I only need to eliminate the zipper in the back. What I really like with this pattern is that the bust is shaped with to big darts, and that makes it very flattering for my figure.

I made the bodice out of the Star Wars fabric and the skirt out of the navy knit. I sew on a regular sewing machine, using the overlock stitch that is both a zigzag and straight stitch. For the  darts and hems I use a regular straight stitch. It is necessary to stabilize the edges of the knit fabric with the overlock stitch, or go over them with a zigzag afterwards, or seam allowances will just roll up and look like sausages.

All my dresses end up in this stage. I have made the bodice and decided on the neckline. The original pattern has a much deeper neckline, but I just filled it in. This skirt is a long piece of fabric that has been gathered and attached to the skirt. Variations on the skirt is how much fabric I use, the original pattern is a quite tight skirt with just two pleats in front and back for shaping, and if I gather or pleat it to the bodice. I had planned on an even wider skirt, but felt that it would be too heavy and pull to much on the bodice. If it had been a woven bodice I could have had more fun with a big, twirly skirt.

Since I had changed the neckline compared to the original pattern I couldn't use its neck facing. I have learnt through the years that the neck opening really needs a facing, otherwise it will look wonky.

To make a new facing I simply put the facing fabric on top of the bodice and traces the neck opening. It's an easy way to make sure that you always get a perfect facing.

The sleeves are another way of making a lot of variations to the dress. The sleeve pattern I'm using is a standard sleeve that I know fit my big upper arms, and by sheer luck t fits perfectly with this bodice pattern. Sometimes I make the sleeve even wider, and I vary the length quite a lot. For this dress I made elbow length sleeves, simply because that was how much fabric I had left. After cutting out the bodice and the sleeves I just had scraps of fabric left. I wanted to add something more to the skirt though.

What I did was to find my biggest heartshaped cookie cutters and use them as a pattern to cut out a bunch of hearts with motifs from the Star Wars fabric to use as applications. I sewed them on to the skirt using a small and tight zigzag stitch.

The finished dress.

I wore the dress yesterday to a Lord of the Rings-concert and I got quite a few compliments from random people in the crowd.

All in all I can make a dress like this in the afternoon, the most time consuming thing was to sew on the hearts. It would take longer to make it in a woven fabric, but I like working with knit fabrics just because it's easy and they are forgiving when it comes to fitting.