Colette's Peony Dress

I'm slowly awakening from my Christmas food coma and seeing as now I probably have to lose a gazillion pounds, baking's out of the question for a little while. But since the past week was actually the first week this year that I was on vacation from all my jobs at the same time, I thought I'd use the time to dust off my sewing machine and practice my (still pretty basic) sewing skills a little.

My fabric box was overflowing anyway, since I had bought at least 15 or 20 different kinds of fabric over the past 9 months or so, each with a specific project in mind at the time....that I had completely forgotten about by the time I opened the box a week ago. The only thing I remembered was that I wanted to finally sew Colette Pattern's Peony dress and I actually even remembered the fabric I had wanted to use for that. So that's what I did.

For my standards, I think it turned out pretty okay. I had some trouble with the instructions (they do some stuff a bit differently than I'm used to doing them, e.g. attach sleeves, and trying it out their way didn't work too well for me unfortunately), but I kind of prevailed at last. There are a few problems here and there (the gathering on the skirt and the sleeves isn't even for example, the fabric puckers between the darts on the bodice), but as I said - for something made by me, it's surprisingly wearable (I'm gonna show you a couple of skirts I've also sewn this week in the next few days where this is very, very different). For some reason, the neckline turned out very high for me, though, which always looks a little bit weird now since the fabric keeps bunching up around the top now. No idea what I did wrong there. But still: something I can live with.

What you can't see on the pictures is how beautiful that fabric actually is. It is extremely light and airy and has a very subtle shimmer to it that looks so pretty in the right light. Unfortunately, it was pretty grey and dark out when I took the pictures, so please excuse the horrible quality.

I'm planning on using the pattern again to make the dress with short sleeves and I have already cut out the fabric for it, however, my sewing machine seems to hate it and eats it the moment I put my foot on the pedal. So yeah, I guess I'm gonna try again with a different needle and yarn, because it'd be a shame to have that beautiful fabric just sitting there gathering dust now.