Wallflower Sewing Project

My cotton ritz dresses from Selkie are among my most favorite dresses of all time.  Every print is a story and they all bring me joy just to look at them, but like nearly every Selkie I own, they needed some alterations to make them fit into my lifestyle.

The cotton Ritz comes with a 20"/51cm tall ruffle that runs all the way around the bottom.  Even being slightly on the taller side like myself means that the dress still drags the ground making it totally impractical for daily wear even though cotton is a daily-wear kind of fabric.  The only sensible solution was to shorten the ruffle, so I did.  I did it on each of my cotton ritz dresses, a terrace gown, and a seashell gown as a matter of fact and the very first dress I tried this on was the Wallflower Ritz. 

 

Since this was the first dress I tried this on, I think I actually took off a bit too much.  I shortened the ruffle by half, taking 10"/25cm off of it.  In future dresses I learned to take only 7"/18cm off so the that it is floor length without dragging.  But, it was all part of the learning process, and after I had shortened it, I was left an extremely long band of beautiful fabric.  I looked at it for months, trying to figure out the best way to use it.

The answer came in the form of a bodice from Simplicity pattern 8252 because it only uses two narrow strips for the front of the bodice, one narrow strip for the back, and no sleeves, only small straps.  I did have to sew a small extension piece at the side of each bodice piece so that it fully fit the pattern, but that was no trouble.

I knew for the skirt, the only kind I'd be able to get from this long strip of fabric was a tiered gathered skirt.  I searched YouTube for a pattern and found this Lolita skirt that gave me the basic ratios on the tiers and then modified the width of each piece since I wanted a long peasant style skirt and not a Lolita Mini Skirt.

I kept the lengths of each tier the same, but modified the widths of the sections so that Tier 1 was 5.5"/14cm, Tier 2 was 7.5"/19cm and Tier 3 was 10"/25.5cm.  I hand sewed the gathering seam since my machine was on the fritz and I couldn't handle the thought of it dying on my in the middle of this project.  Then I pinned and gathered for hours to get everything properly spaced and lined up.  This was by far the most time consuming part of the project.

I am so happy with how this dress turned out, I wish I could make more.  (You can see the other two dresses I made with this pattern here and here.)  Unfortunately, because I cut all the other ruffles 7" instead of 10, I won't be able to repeat this dress with the other left over ruffles, but I will think of something and keep you posted.