Half a dress

First, we had a pretty visitor to the back yard:

My current sewing project is a dress to wear to my niece's wedding, which is in 9 days. Thank goodness I'm not working and I can sew! Right now I have "half-a-dress."

I'm in the middle of cutting it out, which is the part of sewing I like the least. It makes me nervous to cut into the fabric. Cheap fabric, expensive fabric...it doesn't matter. I dislike cutting so much that I had to take a break from it so I thought I'd write to my blog and share the photos.

The dress is #104 from Burda World of Fashion magazine, 5/2008. It's been reviewed numerous times on patternreview and seemed like the perfect dress to make in the short amount of time I have. It's knit, is pretty simple in construction and it seems to be a flattering dress, so it seemed like a good choice. I also have had good experience with Burda patterns so hopefully there won't be any fit problems like there might be with a Butterick or Vogue pattern, since I have less experience with those. Tracing the pattern took a lot of time because I had to make some adjustments like raise the neckline 1 inch, lower the hem line 2 inches (can always shorten), and grade out for the waist and hips (hopefully enough!). Then because the Burda WOF patterns don't have cutting lines, I had to decide how big to make them and make sure I didn't mess up anywhere by making them too small where they need to be bigger, like hems. I usually do 1/4 inch seam allowances on knits because I use the serger and that's what I did on this one. But this has a facing for the top and I hope that the serger finish isn't too lumpy around the neck and armholes. Fortunately I have enough fabric to make two dresses if I wanted, so if it's awful or too small, I can redo it.

So I'll take a deep breath and finish cutting out the rest of the pieces. The easy part will be sewing it. I hope.