Saturday 18 November 2017

Rebecca Taylor Dress

I will be repeating myself but I need to have a constant reminder. I really like Vogue designer patterns (not all of them of course, but from time to time there are real jewels) but I often feel intimidated by them for no special reason. Case in point: this Kay Unger dress and also today's make.

I have seen this R.Taylor dress (Vogue 1316) many times on the internet, especially my favourite sewing blogger Carolyne is a great fan and I think I love all of her versions. Also, it seems like a great use of remnants, so why not to try it. So.. I bought this pattern like 3 years ago and never took the time to really go for it.

I had a little sewcation planned at the end of October (I have more vacation days than my BF which means that I get to take days off while he is working :o) and decided it might be a good opportunity to tackle a more complicated project. Well, the word "complicated" is not well placed because honestly, there was nothing really complicated on this. I must have felt intimidated by the number of pattern pieces and the 4 different colours but honestly, already when sewing my muslin, all was very clear.


I wanted to recreate the look of the pattern envelope because I like the different shades of grey and also, because I had different shades of grey wool fabrics already in my stash. Actually, out of the 4 colours: the light grey was a little remnant from a skirt sewn 4 years ago, the black is a remnant from this dress, the dark grey n°1 is a little piece I bought during sales and only the dark grey n°2 comes from a large piece of fabric which will be used for something else.

As usual, I had to adjust the shoulder area (I think I have taken out about 5-6cm) and took away a few centimeters on the hip area. Also, I cut out the size 10, while I am more between 10 and 12 (on the waist probably a clear 12), but I know that Vogue patterns are always very large on me. And when seeing the pictures, I could have shaved even more to make the dress mote fitted.

The construction went pretty well, I got little bit mad about catchstitching, hopefully it will not deform the dress in some areas.

The dress is properly lined with black silk (need to buy some more of this in the future) and that is about it.

I like the result a lot. It is sewn with wool suitings, so it is more of a autumn/winter dress, however, a cardigan will be worn over it, as I do not think I can pull out the look of the envelope - black tights and no sleeves just does not make much sense for me. And again, I need to stop obsessing about the difficulty of some patterns and just sew them. The dress took cca 20 hours to make, because of all the hand catchstitching, but in general, there was nothing extremely complicated.


4 comments:

  1. Quoique tu dises, elle semble bien compliquée cette robe avec toutes ses découpes...
    Le résultat est très joli, tu auras juste besoin de te réchauffer les épaules!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Merci beaucoup! En fait, les instructions sont très claires: une fois tout découpé, cela s'assemble d'une façon très logique. Et comme j'ai fait une version test, l'assemblage final était très rapide. Le seul bémol: couper la bonne pièce avec la bonne couleur.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is absolutely gorgeous! You did a brilliant job.

    ReplyDelete