Dress by Ikea

You know how when you are building a shelf from Ikea and you get to the end and there's a piece left over, and you stare at it uneasily, thinking, Huh! I wonder what that piece is for! Maybe they threw in an extra?

Our work today was much like that.

We made slow progress at first, mostly in the wrong direction.  We were still struggling with the back pieces, and trying to make it work. This is always a bad sign, but we refused to read it for quite some time.

We sewed the back to the lining just like we had done with the other side before we'd given up for the night. Flipped it over, and dang! It wasn't right. Ripped out the seams, pieced it together anew after much deliberation and flipping of the dress over to see what we had done on the other side.

Taking my turn at seam rippping

Sewed again, flipped again, swore again. No matter how many different ways we tried to sew it, it always came out wrong. I lost count on the number of times. Jenny thinks it was six. Noon came and went, and we had not had a break, but the problem seemed so fixable if we could only understand what was wrong.

We stuffed Stephanie's model with batting to give her more firmness, and put her into the dress to see if we could figure it out. And then it hit us. Both of us at the same time, without a word to the other, realized the problem. We were missing pieces on the back!

The Missing Pieces

On Tuesday, when we were unpacking all of the pieces from when we'd packed up in early June, we found a piece of fabric and discussed what it was for. Huh! I wonder where this goes!  Maybe it was a test piece? Maybe it was extra? We had discussed way back when the need to add panels to the back. We'd cut out the pieces. We'd underlined them. They were italicized, even. But then we'd had to pack everything up and tuck it all away until this week.

Somehow in the packing and unpacking, we forgot that we never attached those back pieces.  Suddenly everything fell into place. All the trouble we'd been going through to piece the back together was because we were doing it wrong!  Lesson learned: if something refuses to work, there's probably a reason.  Second lesson learned: do not ignore those nagging feelings about that extra piece that probably goes somewhere. It does.

In the end, we made very good progress. We pieced together the back--not without some seam ripping and resewing, but we've come to expect that at this point. Jenny hand basted some of the back seams and then hand basted the train to the back of the dress. We found some ribbon we thought might look good on the back, although Jenny's going to make some from the extra silk, so this ribbon was just to test the idea.

And now it looks gorgeous, although it is a bit askew on our Mini-Steph.

Dress back with test ribbon

Tomorrow we plan to hem the dress and hand baste on the lace overskirt. We shall see!