Making a dress

So I’ve decided I’m going to make a long summer dress with sleeves. Of course time will tell whether I actually follow through or not. I do have a tendency to procrastinate. But at the very least I have worked on a design for a dress.

The design is nothing amazing as you can see; but it’s just a drawing. I suspect designs never look particularly awesome when they’re just black and white first sketches with all the eraser marks and everything.

My sketching skills leave much to be desired. I do paint and draw but, as my mother once told me, my talent is raw and needs honing. She meant to insult me of course, but that’s neither here nor there.

The truth is, I have mediocre talent as an artist. And I haven’t been doing any drawing or painting in ages so you can add being rusty to that equation. But I managed to get a dress drawn out this morning. So I’ve taken step 1 in the process of making my long summer dress.

Step 2 will be picking the fabric. Not that these are the standard steps for making a dress. I don’t know the standard steps for making a dress, but I suspect if you end up with a dress it won’t matter so much that you did or did not follow the standard steps, whatever they may be, in the expected order.

What I’ll do now is head to a fabrics website and collect some swatches and play around with filling the drawing with swatch patterns for a bit.

Whatever fabric I select will be light and airy. This will have to be a cotton dress and the material will need to be soft and comfortable because that’s the whole point of wearing a long summer dress. You want to feel relaxed and completely at ease no matter what the heat and humidity factor. You need air to be able to penetrate the material.