Tropical Getaway (and a Dress!)

Garments
Written By Jade .

Hi guys! My family recently took a family vacation to the beautiful island of Kaui, and you just know I had to make a dress for the trip.

The Pattern I Bought

Last time we went to Hawaii, I was ten years old. I remember wearing a certain maxi dress that made me feel so grown up and mature. Since I had such good memories of that dress I wanted to recreate a version for this trip. The original dress was a maxi dress with an open back, spaghetti straps, a drawstring waist, and a ruffle on the bottom.

After a long search for a dress pattern that would work, I decided I would just have to get close and modify the pattern myself. I ended up choosing the Tempo Sundress from Love Notions Sewing Patterns because I liked the shirred back. This meant I ditched the drawstring waist. The pattern was a great pattern with lots of easy to follow instructions and tons of example pictures. I'm sure I'll make this pattern again in the future. And that dress will look nothing like this one!

Crazy Modifications

I have only made one dress and a few pajamas before this project. My point: I am not an experienced garment maker. But I had this vision of a beautiful, flowy, tropical dress that I wanted, and there wasn't a pattern for it. I was determined to create the dress anyway. Here is how I modified the Tempo pattern.

  1. To create a waist that was more defined, I narrowed the top of the skirt piece and increased the size of the shirred panel on the back. That meant I also had to change the placement of the straps.

  2. Since I wanted a very long maxi dress I extended the skirt piece by quite a few inches and reduced the angle of the side seams. The tempo pattern had a ruffle option, but since my skirt piece was so different from their's I had to create my own ruffle dimensions.

  3. I wanted an open back, so I reduced the height of the shirred panel and back pieces. Then I had to redraft the armhole shape so it would grade down to a lower back. That was difficult as a beginner dressmaker.

  4. I redrafted the neckline to be a scoop neck.

This was the dress muslin.

New Skills

This project taught me SO many new skills. Previously, I had never sewn darts, shirred fabric, graded a pattern, sewn a rolled hem, used a rolled hem presser foot, sewn with rayon, made a muslin, or made adjustable straps. I learned a lot. And the final dress was achieved through a lot of trial and error.

Using the rolled hem foot was difficult and finicky. There are a lot of tucks sewn into my bottom hem, but we were leaving on our trip in just a few days and I was so ready to be done making the dress. The upside to the rolled hem was that I didn't have to iron a hem into all that rayon, which is not a fun task.

Here’s Blue helping me cut fabric.

The shirring was fun to do, but it didn't turn out great. It's the only part of the dress that I am not 100% happy with. The elastic on the back is starting to shrink in and pull out of the shirring line. Basically, it's falling apart. How do you guys secure elastic thread when shirring so that this doesn't happen? Please tell me in the comments!

In the end though, I'm so happy with how it turned out and I'm a lot more confident in my dressmaking skills.

The struggle to find the right modeling face.

Project Overview: Hawaii Maxi Dress

Jade .
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