Another Sweet Rose Dress

I'm a fan of Life Sew Savory's Sweet Rose dress, it's easy to make up, and versatile, too - you can make it an every day dress, or a real party dress. I wrote a fuller review of it here. The earlier dresses were in sizes 3 and 6. But it works for an older girl too. 

My oldest grand-daughter, Fleur (6 1/2 going on 17) is not a fan of dresses. In fact, for the first 5 years of her life, it was a battle for her mother to get her into anything with a skirt, even for church. Once she started school, and the uniform worn by all the girls is a brown pleated skirt, she decided this was tolerable, and accepted non-frilly, non-pink, non-princess-y dresses when she had to. (But still prefers something she can climb trees in, like a skort.)

I've given you this context, because you'll perhaps understand how remarkable it is that she actually requested this Sweet Rose dress. But she'd seen her sister's, and how it twirled, and asked for one herself, preferably green.

Here's her sister, Rose.

I'd made a smaller version with only one layer for their cousin Ada, in the green fabric, but I didn't have any of that left. The fabric store (Fabricland) had just re-opened after lockdown, and I scooted down there to pick up some more of the green.  These are the fabrics, a stretch velvet, and a fishscale (or let's call it mermaid tail) lycra fabric.

They are horrible fabrics to work with, especially the velvet. Because of its nap, it slides against itself and anything else. Every time I use it, I swear ' Never again!', but it does look nice when it's done. I've found the only way with the mermaid scale stuff is to sew it only on the wrong side. So I didn't, as I usually would, top-stitch the seams after the gathered layers were attached together.

For this larger size, I made three layers below the yoke / bodice, compared with one for the size 3 and two for the size 6. Each layer was to be about the same finished depth, of about  8". I made myself a little spreadsheet to work out how to cut the skirt layers. 

	cms	inches
total skirt length	55.88	22
therefore each layer circa ( / 3)	18.63	7.3
+ 2 cms S.A. on layers 1 and 2	20.63	8.1
+ 4 cms on layer 3 (for hem)	22.63	8.9

I knew that I wanted a finished total skirt length of 22 inches, or 55.88 cms. Dividing that in three, and then added some on for seam allowance and the bottom hem gave me the measurements above as the depth for each layer. 

I wanted each layer to be about 1.5 times the layer above, in width, so it would be nicely gathered and twirly. The measurement of the bottom of the bodice was just over 33 inches, or 84cms. Multiplying that by c. 1.5 - 1.6, I got figures for layer 1 of 131 cms; layer 2,  196 cms, and 294 cms for layer 3. (I'm now working only in cms as the fabric width I knew to be 147 cms.) Working with those figures, I would have needed 89% of a full width for layer 1, 133% for layer 2, and exactly 200% for layer 2. Rather than mess about with peculiar fractions of widths, I figured it was not far off to use 1 width for layer 1, 1 1/2 for layer 2, and 2 widths for layer 3. And that's what I did.

Fabric width 147cm

bodice bottom	84	33.1	ratios	% of fabric width	use widths:
layer 1 <1 width	131	51.6	1.6	89%	1
layer 2 <2 widths	196	77.2	1.5	133%	1.5
layer 3 2 widths	294	116	1.5	200%	2

I'm still waiting for a twirling picture from Fleur. As soon as the dress was finished, we entered a heat wave, so it was straight into shorts and T shirts for a few weeks. But here are finished pictures. You can see the full width of the skirt here.

Lacking Fleur's presence to try it on, I hung it on the consevatory window where it caught the sun nicely.

And then the breeze caught it. Does she like it? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind!

But finally, I got pictures!