Making Myself Rose’s Idiot’s Lantern Dress For the Final Time

At last, I’m making myself Rose Tyler’s pink dress from the Doctor Who episode The Idiot’s Lantern for the last time. Yippie! Right now my thumb has not improved enough to make myself comfortable to hand sew a lot. Because of this I cannot hand sew the sequins onto the bodice yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the rest of the dress so it will be ready for sequins when my thumb is ready to work!

Although I said I would test out patterns for the dress, I decided for my dress to use the bodice from Simplicity’s 1194 before working with the second pattern. I feel in love with the simplicity of the bodice (No princess seams, just darts) and, despite years of avoiding using darts, I’ve begun to grow a little fond of them lately. Not sure why I’m becoming fond of darts, but I am. Huh.

The skirt of Simplicity’s 1194 is a very full skirt and I do like it very much, but for Rose’s dress I decided to use the skirt from Butterick’s 4443. I lengthened the skirt because it was too short for the proper length of the dress, made it wider, and made a total of seven panels in the skirt. The whole entire dress ended up using about 6 yards of fabric and the skirt was very full.

Like I mentioned before, I decided to not to make the dress out of Duchess satin. Instead, I’m using Casa Satin from Joann’s in the color Rose. It’s the same type of fabric I used for my original Rose dress, but in a different, now discontinued color. It’s also easy for me to find where I live unlike Duchess satin.

After a day’s work, finishing the dress straps, and lining, I had to stop working on it because I reached the point when I’d need to sew bias tape (Which I did not have) to hem the skirt or begin to sew the sequins onto the bodice. Since I’m not ready to do either, I had to stop working on the dress and set it aside until I either get some bias tape or wait till my thumb heals some more.

Since I’m still waiting for my thumb to heal and I’ve made the Rose dress so quickly, I need to find something else to sew with my machine. I have plenty of projects to work on, yet I’m having trouble deciding which one to work on next. I’ll see what project I have the most motivation to work on later. Right now I’ll just enjoy the fact I can make a dress so fast and it still looks good!

Although I was able to make the dress fast, I still had problems with the fit of the bodice. I hope to talk about this pattern and the other pattern I considered using and how the fabric the person making the dress bodice out of influenced pattern choice in another post.