Gold Colour Block Maxi

 An old friend of my mothers came over for lunch and I showed her my blog and everything and was moaning about the lack of need for maxi dresses. Her response to that was to invite my family to a black tie dinner, and this was the dress that I made for that occasion. I started with a tee-shirt block from Wendy Mullins' Sew U Home Stretch which I've used before for my dotty knit dress and floral tank.

 The key features are the colour-blocked sweetheart neckline, elastic waist and side split. The fabrics are black jersey (2.50pm) and gold/black printed jersey (6.50pm). Seeing as I only used half a metre of the black jersey this dress only cost me around 8.50 in total, including elastic.

Please don't notice the fact that I used bias binding as a ribbon because I have no idea where I put my actual black ribbon!

So, getting on to how I made it! 

Trace your existing pattern piece onto a new piece of paper (I use greaseproof/baking paper) and draw where you want your sweetheart neckline to be. Bear in mind that both the back and the front pieces are cut on the fold.

Add seam allowance to where you have just cut on each piece. I masking taped some more greaseproof paper underneath so I could do this. Then make a mock up to see if it looks like the way you want it. 

I then put my pattern piece to my mannequin and drew a line across where the armpit started. This I then drew onto the back piece so the colour blocking would be level all of the way round. Then I cut where the line was and added seam allowances, as I did with the front piece. Now the bodice is ready to be cut out of the main fabric!

I put the back yoke on top of the lower back piece right sides together and sewed across the top. This seam was then opened, and the seam allowance topstitched down. I repeated this with the front pieces.

The skirt was 2 rectangles the same width as the bottom of the bodice pieces. Make sure this measurement is bigger than your hip measurement. The side seams were sewn together and the bodice was put inside the skirt so the right sides of the skirt and the bodices touched. The waist seam was sewn and I then stretched a piece of elastic the size of my waist around the waist seam and sewed that down. 

I then tried it on and realised that a split was needed for any moveability so I unpicked the bottom half of one of the side seams. I then made bias binding from a strip on the bias. This strip was folded in half, stitched right sides together to the neckline and armholes and pressed upwards so that the seam was hidden inside. This could also be top-stitched. Just sewn the hem and you're done!

I layered the dress over a black long sleeved tee so that's why the armholes and the neckline look a bit funny!

Ok, so maybe I unpicked a bit more than half of the side seam...

Hopefully that all makes sense! 

Thanks so much for reading!

Lauren xx