Gothic Goddess Dress (Drape Drape No.17)

The whole idea behind this dress came from buying a big black and gold necklace and realising I had nothing it would go with.

Figuring the only thing for it was to make something, I decided to sketch out some ideas...but liked the first thing I drew so settled on that.

The basic idea was a dark/gothic take on a loosely ancient Egyptian look, with the "no.17 goddess drape dress" from Hisako Sato's Drape Drape in mind.

No.17 Goddess Drape Dress from Drape Drape by Hisako Sato

I've made a few items from this book now (no.5 and no.13 (yet to be blogged)) and really loved all of them, so I was excited to get a chance to try out another pattern. This style of draped dress is one that I've always loved, so it was good to have an excuse to make one (if you can call needing a dress to suit a necklace you randomly bought an excuse...).

Step one was tracing out the pattern - I think I've sufficiently explained before how much I dislike this process in a previous post, so I'll skip over that...once traced out, you'll have yourself two enormous pattern pieces.

I'd normally cut this kind of thing out with a rotary cutter, but the pieces were too damn big for my board, so I just cut them out with scissors as carefully as I could. 

With the pieces cut out, I hemmed the necklines and the bottom, then it was on to pinning the tucks. This was where I spent most of my time, but after a couple of hours they'd all been pinned and tacked into position. From then on, it was plain sailing - just sew up the shoulders, finish the seams, sew up the sides, finish the seams, and BOOM you've got yourself a dress.

Here's how it looks on the mannequin:

And here's how it looks on:

And I must say that once again, I am very impressed with how it turned out. It drapes beautifully, with that undeniable essence of Japanese minimalism. It was also refreshingly simple and quick to make - it was finished in a day and that is basically unheard of for me. I like this book. And I can't imagine this will be the last you'll see me mention it.