Erdem Chocolate Linen & Lace Dress - Pt. 1

Fashion Week starts next week and the designers will be showing Spring 2013 but this dress from Erdum's Resort 2012 line really pushed my creative buttons.  Now to be honest, this is just one of the dresses from this line that I loved but it's the one that shouted my name the loudest.  You may yet see more interpretations from this collection...especially since Erdum is fast becoming my favorite designer!

photo courtesy of Style.com

The dress on the left is the one that I want so I collected the following fabrics from "The Collection." How kewl is that?  That I had all of this on hand!

Of course, I knew that I would start with my TNT dress pattern to make this garment. And after the twists and turns of my last dress adventure, something familiar was what I needed to sew!  This will be my autumn lace dress since lace is still quite popular heading into fall.  The linen fabric is from the Couture Line at Fabric Mart and the lace is an Anna Sui polyester blend from Emmaonesock.

To me the most important part of making this dress work is the lace overlay. Normally, I would spend days riding the bus back and forth to my job figuring out the construction order of the dress.  Since I've been on vacation for awhile now, I'm working the order out as I make the dress which, of course, has slowed down it's construction - but since that seems to be the operative word of this sewcation - slow - I'm okay with that. 

Determining how to make the lace overlay ~
My first challenge was trying to see the back of the dress.  I searched all over the internet and none of my favorite retailers even purchased this dress.  What the heck is wrong with them!?  Couldn't they see the beauty of this sheath?  So from a piece of the side view in the picture above, I determined that the back has the lace overlay too...especially after looking at the backs of quite a few of the designer's other dresses.  He typically carries the design all the way through the back. 

Making the lace overlay ~
From those observations this is what I did to make the lace overlay...

To prepare the lace fabric, I pinned all of the scallops together.

Then I determined how wide I wanted the center portion to be.  I chose 6" after measuring across the front of me.  I started out with 10" and moved down to 8", finally settling on 6 because I liked the proportion of lace and linen.

Next I laid the front dress pattern piece on top of the lace measuring 3" from each scallop to the pattern's center front line.  I wanted to insure that there was a standard 6" down the front of the dress.

For the back piece I used a 3.5" measurement to account for the back seam and vent. The lace pieces were first pinned to the linen with pins inserted every couple of inches to get a good hold.  I used my pink & raspberry pins so that I could see them through the lace.

Then I carefully and slowly machine stitched the lace scallops to the linen fabric using the smallest stitch on my sewing machine (2.2).  I wanted a lot of stitches to insure that the lace pieces were stitched down completely to the linen dress front and backs.

I hand basted the remaining portions of the lace to the linen. Finally I serged the lace and linen pieces together.  

The dress front and backs were now ready to be sewn together. Since this is my TNT dress pattern, I will sew it together like normal.  This is where I am now so the next post about this garment will be the reveal.

...as always more later!