Little Brown Dress

I’ve never really been drawn much to the color brown; it always seemed so drab to me. Given a choice of neutral colors, I tend to gravitate towards black and gray and more recently white, cream and navy. Yet my avoidance of brown has somewhat waned over the years. I have a few pairs of brown shoes (although if I’m being honest had they’d had the option of black, I would’ve gotten them in black). Yet I’m not so opposed to brown now because I can see that it has a warmth that black does not; so wearing brown can be especially nice in combination with brighter and lighter colors.

Sometime ago at a fabric store, I picked up some coffee brown sateen (that was of course on sale). For a brown, I actually liked it—it was so dark and rich and chocolate colored. I finally got around to using this fabric and decided to make a dress with it.

I’m getting more used to sewing now, but I’m still not really good at altering patterns to fit my measurements. I’ve tried here and there with mixed success, but on this dress I decided not to bother. I didn’t really think my measurements were so far from the pattern’s size measurements to make a huge difference…but it kind of did. [Sigh.]

Once the dress was finished and I tried it on, I saw that it was looking looser than I wanted it to be, especially in the top portion. To fix this, I took one of the pleats from the side of the dress and created a long dart across the width of the dress. This did improve the fit (although it did change the original look of the dress).

I don’t think this dress turned out too badly, all things considered. But one of these days I’m going to get better from the get-go dealing with the fit issue so I don’t have to hodgepodge the fit at the end. [Pause.] Sounds like work. [Sigh.]