FO: The 99 Luftballoons Dress

Wow! What a whirlwind week! I have a bit of catching up to do and the first thing I want to share is my dress that I finished last week.  The challenge over at the Sew Weekly was fabric painting and/or dyeing.

My inspiration this week was the song '99 luftballoons' by Nena.  I wanted to recreate the red balloons floating across a dress.  Once I had decided on this idea, I choose Simplicity 2180 as the dress pattern.  I really loved View A which was a knee length sleeveless dress, gathered at the waist with a fabulous cut-out back which closed with tied bow.

I made the dress out of 100% cotton material as I thought that would be the easiest to paint.  Simplicity 2180 was fairly easy to put together, though it did take some time.  I ended up not putting in the pockets but I followed all  the other directions to a T!  The directions were fairly clear except for the waistband facing--I found it a really bizarre way to put the dress together and it didn't become immediately clear until about 9 steps later.  At that point I had the 'aha' moment and figured out the reason they were having me do things a certain way.  Sometimes I wish they put little notes in the directions like the following..."I know this won't make sense...but trust me later when you attach the skirt to the bodice, having this bit the way it is will make it look all nice and pretty inside...."  That's all I really need.  Otherwise, my inclination to skip steps increases!!

The nuts and bolts of the dress is that it is one bodice front piece with two darts and two bodice back pieces with an attached bow tie.  Their method of constructing the bow tie is fabulous and worked really well.  The bodice is attached to the skirt via a waist yoke (with aforementioned tricky waist yoke).  Normally there would be pockets in the side seams but I was too impatient to put those in (seriously--there were 35 steps to constructing the dress and nearly 10 of them were for the pockets!!).

Here's what the dress looked like before the 'balloons':

The dress is actually designed so that the shoulders sit almost 'off the shoulder'.  I find this a bit annoying and keep wanting to pull my sleeves up to sit more on top of the shoulder.  I think if I were to make this pattern again I would adjust it so that it sits more properly on top of the shoulder.

This is another David n' Debi creation as David painted the balloons on the dress for me! YAY! It was a crazy week as I was getting ready to head to the States to visit my family and David wanted to help out.  He's also really good at freehand drawing and created the balloon template above.  What a wonderful partner :)

I absolutely LOVE this dress! The balloons float up the dress and down the back! It's so fabulous.  The black paint was a bit harder to work with than the red paint for some reason.  The balloons start out larger on the bottom of the dress and gradually get smaller.  We also decided to not paint the waistband or shoulder yokes.  I really love how it turned out!!!

I really love the back of the dress! It's so playful.  It does present a bit of a challenge in terms of picking the right undergarments--something with a low back band is best (or a clear back band--which is what I want to get!)

 

YAY! I love it so much! What do you think?