Recreating Lily Aldrin's Dress

New year, new intensive dress re-creation project! I love this 1960s-esque day dress that Lily wears in an episode of How I Met Your Mother, which I realise is more of a red hue, but the one in my memory was rather coral in colour.

I've had this project in the back of my mind for quite a long time, and I bought this fabulous orange stretch cotton jersey fabric from Minerva back in the summer. I find it takes some mental psyching up to do a self-drafted project!

The biggest challenge for me was working out what to do with my basic bodice pattern pieces in order to create the gathered effect on all the orange pieces. I chose to increase the front and back bodice pattern pieces by 1.5 times their normal size, and to do this I cut the pieces in half (after removing the darts) and added a strip of paper in the middle, then smoothed the edges to create a stretched version of the original shapes.

The skirt was an easier puzzle, as I just created rectangular pieces by squaring up from the bottom, after deciding on my desired hem width. The sleeves were copied from my Queen's Gambit dress recreation, and then expanded a little to create the slightly gathered cuff.

As the dress came together and the zip was put in, I was a little unimpressed by the bulkiness of the top half, as I think I had overestimated how much gathering needed to be done! On reflection I probably should have done 1.25 the original bodice pattern pieces, given there is already stretch in the fabric. So a couple of catch stitches in the bodice was in order.

The white collar at the front was also originally a little off-shape, so as I came to finishing, I went back and altered it, resulting in a slightly thinner strip than planned but at least it was a smoother curve.

Et voilà! Such a bold dress to wear, and a little more interesting having the empire line rather than the usual waistline cinched in. I can't imagine this will be as recognisable as the Queen's Gambit dress, but you never know...