We've come a long way from red satin

Last night I finished the dress for O to wear to our wedding.  It has been a long time coming.

O is a girl who dreams of weddings - she was so excited when we told her that we were getting married ("Finally!", she said) but the excitement wore off rapidly once she realised that our plans for the marriage ceremony were vastly more minimalist and laid back than hers.

For the past few days she has been illustrating her Dream Wedding, to show me how it should be done.  At the moment it stretches to 5 sheets of A4 paper taped together, but I have no doubt it will end up even bigger.  It is most definitely not a minimalist wedding.

The groom is unnamed, but frankly that doesn't matter.  He has a very small role to play in all this.  She has two of her friends, three of her cousins and her brother as attendants.  C was very cross when she drew him wearing a red checked shirt, so she is still pondering what to put two of her boy cousins in.  The friends and her girl cousin are dressed in long white dresses with gold necklines and gold hair accessories.  All the family are there to watch, and all of the girls from her class at school too.

There will be a limousine to transport her from the wedding to the party afterwards.  The wedding feast features all her favourite food - brownies, strawberries, blackberry pie and cinnamon rolls.  Well, why not?

So you can imagine, with her deep enthusiasm for all things wedding-related, that when I asked her what she would like me to make for her to wear to our ceremony she had a detailed description, and illustration, all ready.  It went something along the lines of 'what Pippa Middleton wore, but in red satin'. 

That was never, ever going to happen, on so many levels, and it has taken weeks of delicate diplomacy to find something that both she and I were happy with.  What she chose in the end surprised me.  She wanted this simple camisole dress from my Japanese pattern book.

And even more surprisingly, she wanted me to make it with some pink cotton printed with roses (by Tilda), from my fabric shelves.  This fabric is much more to my taste than hers, so I was surprised but delighted.

The dress is very simple and quick to make, but annoyingly came out far, far too big for her.  This is odd because everything else I've made for her from the book, in the 140cm size, has fitted her beautifully.  So I unpicked the side seams and re-sewed them at the top with a whopping 3.5cm seam allowance rather than the 1.5cm it should have been, grading out to the 1.5cm allowance about half way down.  I also added a pleat into the front, to stop any gaping around the neckline. 

As so often happens with fudges alterations to dress patterns, I have ended up liking the amended version a whole lot more than the original.  My re-drafting of the side seams has given the dress much more of an A line shape, and the pleat at the front makes for a more interesting neckline.

Most importantly, however, it meets with O's approval, and the arguments about red satin have finally been put to rest.