A Wrap Dress for my Baby Shower

Now that I have finally finished all my University assessments for the year, I can get back to sewing, Yay! About a week and a half after my last assessment was due, I had my baby shower. We had it a bit earlier than I would have liked, in order to avoid the craziness of Christmas and the New year. Naturally I used this as an opportunity to make myself another pretty maternity gown. After trawling through pinterest I knew I wanted a wrap style of dress, but the only wrap dress pattern I had was for knit fabrics, and I really wanted to use a gorgeous floral Japanese lawn that I bought from Spotlight a bit less than a year ago. So, of course, I decided to hack a pattern I already owned, into something suitable.

I decided to use New Look 6123 in a size 18, as it already had a crossover neckline, so I figured it would work. I shortened each bodice by 4 inches, to bring the waistline up to an empire line, then simply cut 2 long 4 inch wide strips for the ties and divided up the rest of the yardage into 3 skirt panels, with the front 2 panels being a bit fuller than the back panel, to accommodate my still growing baby bump.

It all went together very easily, until I got up to pressing the hems on the front edges, and I realised one of the front skirt panels had been sewn with the wrong side facing out! Fortunately (and probably why I made the mistake in the first place) there is not a great deal of difference between the right and wrong sides of this fabric, but it happened to be the front panel that was crossing over in front of the other. I decided to unpick a bit of the opposite side seam on the bodice, so that I could cross it over the other way, and hide the backwards panel behind the other front panel. This was a whole lot easier than unpicking the whole panel and turning it the right way out, especially for a dress I may only get a few months wear out of.

There is some slight gaping in the neckline, and it sits a bit lower than I would have liked, but other than that, I love how the dress turned out, especially as I managed it out of only 3m of fabric. Unfortunately we didn't remember to take many photos with our good camera, so instead, mostly just have photos taken with my mother's iphone 7, and honestly, I cannot see why people rave about them at all, the photo quality is pretty horrendous.

My Grandparents, me and Mum

Hubby and I with his parents

My beautiful sis in law

My crazy bestie

And here is about when we remembered to use the good camera.

Cutting the cake, jellybeans and all.

The only full length photo of my dress

Anyone else done any Maternity sewing lately?

Dixie