Belladone_Dentelle_9

February is flying like crazy and I still haven’t found time to finish my Trello tutorial! I really hope I can do that soon… In the meantime I took out my camera tripod last weekend to snap a few pictures of the Belladone dress I made last Fall.

Belladone_Dentelle_1

This dress means a lot to me because it is actually the bridesmaid dress I made for Eléonore’s wedding! The constraints were as follows: Deer&Doe pattern, burgundy fabric. Pretty straightforward, right? I spent a long time agonizing over the pattern choice (Centaurée? Réglisse? Aubépine?) and brainstorming with the other girls (it’s not easy to get four ladies to agree when you’re trying to each use a different pattern!) and I finally settled on the Belladone dress.

Belladone_Dentelle_4

For the fabric though I went a bit out of the box: we said burgundy, but warm colors look really bad on me (I’m a “Cool Summer”, you see) so I bargained to be able to use a colder color. A dozen swatches later, I got this lovely raspberry cotton twill. The color on my pictures is true to life, so it’s really different from what is shown on the shop website, and I love it… but it is a real pain when it comes to wrinkles!

Belladone_Dentelle_3

I was a bit afraid that the Belladone would be too serious for a wedding compared to more flowy, less structured patterns, so I decided to add matching lace (this one). Lace all-over was a bit too much, and would have prevented me from wearing it again that much. I considered doing the upper-back pieces in lace only, but I wasn’t digging the look of semi see-through parts over opaque parts on this pattern (you can see what it looks like on this version for instance).

Belladone_Dentelle_7

I chose instead to do those pieces in both twill and lace and treat both layers as one. To do so I cut the lace parts by placing them over the selvedge, hemmed the twill parts and then basted them together two-by-two at the neckline and armholes.

Belladone_Dentelle_5

Even though I currently have four Belladone dresses in my closet (a blue one with striped binding that I made a few years ago, a burgundy one that Mag gave me and a floral one gifted to me by Eléonore herself), it seems like I still haven’t mastered the fit. I have a long bust, so I took on the habit of lengthening the bust of all my Deer&Doe patterns by 2 centimeters above the waist. I think it works pretty well from the front, where I think the proportions are more flattering than they were on my blue Belladone.

Belladone_Dentelle_8

However from the back it looks pretty messy on the pictures: the bust is too long and there is a lot of extra fabric. Eléonore kindly suggested that I should add only 1cm and not 2 and that it might work better for me.

Belladone_Dentelle_6

I’m keeping this in mind for the next one. Next one? When do you reach the point where you realize that you have enough dresses made from the same pattern? I’m just asking because now there is also the closed-back version, and I still haven’t made it, so…

Belladone_Dentelle_2

Raspberry Belladone
Belladone – Deer&Doe
Size 38/36,5/40
Lengthened by 2cm at the bust
Cotton twill from Fabric.com
Lace from Fabric.com

Tagged in:

,