Engagement Photos Dress - Part 2!

Guess what? Spoiler alert - I finished the dress in time for our photoshoot! :)

It was very much "down to the wire" since I had a two week trip to Australia right in the middle of the time I had to make it. I know, great planning, but it's done and it looked beautiful and I am very happy overall with how it turned out.

This post is going to cover the creation of the base dress, or "layer one" of the outfit. I'll try to remember all of the details that I went through to get the bodice to fit - all of which I talked about extensively on my Instagram stories as I was going through it (@katherinesopes, now saved as a highlight!). I think I ended up going through three design iterations with maybe six partial or full muslins of the top.

First I tried to do thetriangle top with a band around the waist to emulate some of the inspiration images, but it just wasn't fitting nicely and I couldn't find a pattern online anywhere that I could adjust to work. I then went over to the original dress pattern I had chosen and tried to edit after toadd straps rather than being a strapless sweetheart neckline. That was resulting in a lot of side boob gaping. At which point I pulled out my butterick gertie pattern that I knew fit and compared the two pieces to see where I needed to add in.

At this point I was sick of muslining so I decided it was good enough and wanted to start cutting out my real fabric. Which turns out the weight of the mauve fabric was slightly different than the muslin, so I added some fusible interfacing which beefed it up but also made wrinkles more obvious. Oh well win some lose some.

Then I added the chiffon layer, which I decided to just add to the skirt portion because I thought it would look nice and I didn't want to fuss with the top anymore.

After that I was happy with the fit and style, just had a lot of hemming and a tricky invisible zipper to insert and I was ready to move on to the lace layer!