The city hall dress

    I have been talking forever with my mother in law about making her outfits for her daughter's wedding. On one of this discussions my sister in law was present and I offered to make her dress too for the city hall ceremony that is usually a simple knee length day dress that should not been to difficult with her figure if we found the right fabric. So she tagged along when I went fabric shopping with my mother in law and we she spotted a very cute brocade with panels section.
   I thought a dress with princess seams and pleated skirt will look really good on her and in this fabric so I suggested McCall's 7536 to her and she immediately agreed to view D:

    I made a muslin right away for size 8 based on finished bust measurement and the fit was pretty  good. All I needed to do was widen the shoulders a bit and lower the neck line.
   I had a bit of trouble with the invisible zipper that just would not want to cooperate and I had to unpick and throw away 3 zippers until all went well... Also I first attached the lining a bit to tight at first and was pulling a bit on the back zipper to I had to rip some part there too but I am quite happy with the final result.

She wanted some sort a belt so this were the options we considered:

It was a really cute dress and she loved it:

And I also made my mother on law dress for the same event using Butterick 5778:

It was a very easy sew with a bit of hesitation with some notches not lining up but still a great patern in my opinion. I made the skirt a bit for full then their design and added a large belt with pipping. I hand sew the hem to make it invisible on the front and also added piping and cuffs to the sleeves to go with the tie belt.

On the muslin I added some extra fabric to the side panels seams as I was afraid it might be to tight but it was not and I ended removing that extra so in the end the actual patern was pretty good. Same happened with the length ( 1st added some extra then removed the extra) !

I was a bit sorry I directly cut the pattern pieces instead of tracing them out because I was falling in love with the design even in the bigger size and definitively want a version of this cowl for myself:

They both looked lovely in their dresses. I used an old dress from a wedding last fall as did Eva. I was very stressed at the time since there were only 2 days left until the church wedding and the wedding dress was far from finished.

 Counting this 2 dresses gets me to Sewing 80 - Shopping 62 for this year.