Mod Blue Zéphyr

It was hard to choose photos for this dress because there were so many good ones! That’s a good sign. I feel really amazing in this dress. It fits so well and it’s also very comfortable because it’s a knit. It’s a double-sided punta di roma that I scored for just €3 per meter. It’s got a good weight to it and it’s very swishy. It’s such a great colour. In certain light, it almost looks purple (like under my sewing machine). The other side is black, which I think gives it a nice depth to the colour.

The pattern I used is Deer and Doe’s Zéphyr dress. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this pattern, it comes with two necklines: high crewneck and v-neck. I’ve hacked the neckline to have a retro sweetheart style neckline. And I absolutely love the way it turned out.

Last time I was in Canada, my cousin and I went shopping at Blame Betty. I found this really cute skater dress for a steal of a deal and I knew I would want to recreate it. I thought the Zephyr dress would be perfect because it’s got the same half circle skirt. I wasn’t sure how this neckline would look sleeveless, but I knew the princess seamed bodice would be very flattering.

I put off modifying the pattern for quite a while, because I knew I would have to do some minor pattern surgery to get the princess seams to fit right. Deer and Doe patterns are quite short-waisted, so I knew I would have to lengthen the bodice. I also have to do a low bust adjustment on pretty much any pattern, but thankfully this was quite painless thanks to this tutorial on the Curvy Sewing Collective. The difference between this pattern and the pattern in the example is that the bust point is marked by the triangle instead of having a triangle at the high bust and underbust points. So when drawing my boxes, I just tried to make the distances look as similar as I could to the photos in the post.

The original dress

Instead of starting with a muslin, I went straight to modifying the pattern using my shoulder to bust point measurement. I quickly made a muslin, found out the bust point was too low, so I moved it up 1cm. When it all came down to it, I had done a 3.5cm low bust adjustment and lengthened the bodice by 3cm.

Next, I traced the neckline from my original dress onto the pattern, then cleaned it up and added seam allowances. Zephyr comes with neck bands, but my original dress has facings, so I also created facings by tracing the ones from the original dress. The facings are stablized with lightweight interfacing.

The facings are staystitched up to the ‘collar’ points, and top stitched along the neckline. The back facing is also stitched down along the bottom edge, which you see quite often in ready to wear.

I don’t know why I always get so nervous about modifying a pattern. It usually turns out pretty awesome. Like with my Floralex dress. I hope to wear this dress to a wedding at the end of summer. I think it’ll be good for dancing.