I wanted this dress from The Gap:

But it was all out in my size. So I thought, “I know!  I will sew one!  How hard can it be?”

I searched for a pattern that matched the dress and came up with this one from Vogue:

All I needed to do was to bring in the shoulders for style D (the one with the fuller skirt) and it was an exact match!

I found a nice cotton lawn at Jo-Ann’s, yes, Jo-Ann’s.  

I started to think about how to change the shoulders and there is where I got stuck.  I hadn’t sewn for a while and the alteration was confusing me. So I signed up for a group open sewing gathering at the Victorian Cupboard and we made it work!

My next stumbling block?  Well, other than the fact that I put the facing on backwards and I had to rip it all out and re-apply it (a very painstaking and slow task due to the fact that I was using a cotton Lawn and I didn’t want to rip it), was the button holes.  I had an irrational fear of the button holes.  I was sure that my dress would end up all crooked due to misplacement of the button holes!  I cannot tell you how many practice button holes I made and how many weeks it took until I finally put them on this dress.

Then I put it down.  I started the dress in August and then it got too cold to wear it and there went my incentive to finish.  I picked it up again this spring thinking that all I had left were a few button holes and then the buttons.  But, surprise!, I had already done all the button holes, I just needed to sew on the buttons.

Since then I’ve worn it twice.  I am really happy with how it turned out.  No one asked me if I had made the dress which was reassuring, it didn’t look homemade!