I is for invisible zipper

At long last! I have finished the Fairy Tale dress by Oliver + S that I started last October. Major UFO in my sewing area. (UnFinished Object)

The long and drawn-out saga of this dress is ... last fall, I needed to make RG's baptism dress and I had just bought this pattern as a gift for Mindy, but not sent it to her yet. So when RG said she wanted this for her baptism dress, I pulled out this cute lightweight blue cotton to use for a mockup. If it got messed up, oh well. If it worked, she'd end up with 2 dresses. I got the bodice most of the way done when I ran out of time, so I switched to a different pattern I already knew for the baptism dress. And this got set aside until after Christmas.

Spring rolls around. RG could use another church dress, so I picked it back up. I have now put in darts, and my first zipper! An invisible zipper is tucked in behind the fabric, as you can see, rather than exposed up the back. I obviously didn't get it lined up perfectly - I have no idea how that happened - but her hair covers it when she wears it so whatever.

I was going to put the sleeves on it but by the time I got around to finishing it, RG had grown a bit more. I had to cut the neckline lower so it wasn't choking her, and cut the arm holes bigger. They wouldn't match the sleeve pattern, so I just did the sleeveless binding for the arm hole edges. It was ... weird. I don't even know how to explain how that worked. You'd just have to try it.

This dress also took FOR-EV-ER because adding the lining, along with a layer of tulle in the skirt, got complicated. It looks like such a basic dress! But it's not! I read the directions a million times and still didn't understand what was going to happen until I was actually doing it. And then I put the skirt lining in backwards/inside out, so I had to take it apart and do it again. Another delay.

I finally got it done in May and RG wore it to church in New York. The next Sunday, JE decided she wanted to wear it (they wear close to the same size), and literally 10 minutes later, she got black acrylic paint on the front bodice. I still have no words ... the most complicated dress I've ever sewn, SO many hours on it, and it was worn once before it was basically ruined. I soaked the dress in rubbing alcohol for darn near a month, scrubbed at the paint, and washed it about 5 times, and it's finally scrubbed and faded out enough to be unnoticed. It's not entirely gone.

So. Whew. The letter I is done. Moving on.