Creating My FMP Toile

I pinned all of my pattern pieces on to the calico and cut them out. I also colour coded these pieces to avoid getting them mixed up and so I knew what piece went where. Once they were all cut out I started to sew them all together. Before I could sew the entire dress together I had to sample curved seams to make sure I knew what I was doing. This went well and I felt confident to stitch my toile together.

I started with the two centre back pieces first because it would mean that the shape of the skirt would form properly. I decided to sew the skirt first and then the bodice afterwards. The neck piece of the bodice had to have two pieces as I was planning on stuffing it. I had already sampled using the wadding for the stuffing of the neck piece. I wanted to stuff the neck piece of my toile but unfortunately we sewed the bias binding on to the neck piece before we remembered it needed stuffing. This is not too much of a problem because I am quite confident it will work first time on my final dress. I had to make my binding for this toile because I didn't have any but I'm going to try and buy some for my final dress as this will be much easier and will take less time.

My next step was to sample the tentacles of my dress. I did this by ripping chiffon. I then pinned together the waist bands of the skirt and bodice and wedged in my sample tentacles to see if it looked better on the outside of the skirt or sewed on to the hem of the skirt which i also experimented with. Another experiment was stitching the end of the tentacles to the waistband and hem but the best experiment was when I stitched the tentacles to the inside waistband of the skirt. This allowed the tentacles to hang lose on the inside of the skirt before dangling out from under the hem at the bottom. This fit in with my original design idea better.

My next stage was to put the zip into my toile. I used a concealed zip, placed the zip foot on the sewing machine and placed the zip along the section I'd left on the bodice. The zip was too long and so I had to alter it first and make it shorter I found when I had sewed the zip in that I had sewed it in too low. For my final dress I will have to make sure I measure exactly where the zip needs to go and be more accurate to stop this happening again.

I then sewed the waist of the skirt and the bodice together. Unfortunately the seams on the panels didn't quite match up and so I need to make sure that on my final dress I am more accurate with my sewing. Another issue I had was that the bodice was too big around the top part which meant it gaped slightly. I will have to reduce all of the front bodice panels by 1/2 cm so that it fits better for my final dress.