#rectangle dress

I didn’t make a tutorial for that one, but I have some proof images I took for the contest.

I also have this picture of Duffy and his bear-sized sewing machine. The dark secret is that I have a bear make all of my tutorials for me.

The bodice was a rectangle that was about my full bust measurement+ 2″ or so. A little bit of ease, but not a ton. I marked the shirr lines on it, which I based off making it look like the bodice of Shirring Princess. I didn’t do any math for that.

After a decent amount of testing, I put the elastic thread in my bobbin (I put it on the bobbin via the machine’s bobbin winder while the thread was in tension, instead of winding it by hand like a lot of people suggest), and just sewed straight lines on the right side.

The very top edge has a casing, and I put 1/4″ elastic in it instead of doing a line with my machine and the elastic thread. I wanted to make sure the top closed up and didn’t gap, and to do that I needed to be able to very carefully control the amount of elastic in there.

After that, I pinned on the straps and then sewed them in place. In hindsight, it might have been easier to do the straps last, since my skirt is slightly crooked.

As you can see, the elastic isn’t super tight or hugging the dress form. It doesn’t really need to be, as long as it’s getting some shape and isn’t stretched completely flat over the bust point. 

The skirt had a larger center panel that I added pintucks to. The whole skirt had two layers of ruffles. The top layer didn’t cross the center panel. (Yes, this design was inspired by that one tutorial, which was down due to Photobucket at the time that I made this, but appears to be back up).

I was bad and didn’t do a gathering string. I just spaced the ruffle and then sewed it down by pleating it so that it’d look ruffled.

This picture’s just here because it has the elastic thread that I used for the bodice in it. I didn’t use the elastic thread for the skirt.

And that’s basically the whole thing.

The skirt (flat) is maybe 3x longer than the bodice (flat) is. I think a lot of people get tripped up because they think that the overall dress should be a rectangle, and you can’t actually do that and get the right lolita shape. Just make the skirt the way you would for a regular lolita skirt, shirr the bodice tube, and connect them together by gathering the skirt’s fullness into the bodice.

The reason I suggest doing the straps last is because mine ended up like this on the first try:

…pretty lopsided. I had to take off the skirt and sew it on again.

It might also be helpful to have a casing at the very bottom of the bodice, so that you can put elastic in there and have a very defined waist. However, I feel like this still made me a perfectly nice dress without that. It’s pretty plain as far as lolita dresses go, but I feel like a lot of that could be made up for in blouse and other coordination options.