FINISHED! Bird of Paradise raglan dress

A number of months ago now, I was offered Stylish Party Dresses from Tuttle Publishing to review and I have finally got around to blogging about my make. Despite loving a lot of the clothes, I settled on V, the raglan dress as my first make from this book.

I initially started making it out of some fabric from Tessuti but I messed up the tracing and cutting of the facing, so that version is still sitting in my unfinished pile.  It's an easy fix but I just haven't got back to it.  I then made it out of this gorgeous linen/cotton blend from Spotlight (Sarah has made some shorts out of so watch out for them!) as a wearable muslin as I had the intention of splurging and buying this gucci silk. Of course I rang today and it's all sold out. Booo :(

So, my gucci dress isn't to be, so let's just talk about this one. Up front it's not a woohoo make.. and that's not just because it's not in the gucci fabric!  I like the fabric, I like the style, but something just doesn't click for me. Maybe it's the length, or the sleeves or something. I like how it's a bit trapeze- y which is probably due in part to the heavy fabric. But, well, I just think I've looked better. And there is a bit of white leaf on the neck which bugs me!

The dress is super easy to put together (once you get the facing traced correctly) and I love a facing - so much easier than binding. It is really long which i was surprised about so hacked a lot off the bottom (maybe too much?).  It doesn't have any pockets so I stuck a patch pocket in between the right and middle of the dress. It's an odd placement but I like it.  You can't see it in these pictures due to my fantastic pattern matching ! :)

In the dress's defense, I wore it to work yesterday and got a heap of compliments and wore it most of the day with my white sneakers on as I had walked from the car park and never bothered to change my shoes and actually really liked it that way. I will definitely wear it to work on really hot days as there is nothing more comfy than a loose shift and the massive patch pocket makes it feel like a bit of a house dress.

I'm loving all the foliage prints out at the moment and finding it hard to resist buying them all. I have a pair of foliage culottes which I'll blog soon. We'll be home be home before Christmas and I have a big backlog of makes to blog so I'd better get on with it!